Just like heaven can't wait

'Just like heaven can't wait' is an in-progress series that addresses the ‘paradox of plenty’ —the paradox that the threat to society, self-perception and personal connection posed by technology is overabundance and excess rather than scarcity and lack.

Just like heaven can't wait is an in-progress series that addresses the ‘paradox of plenty’ —the paradox that the threat to society, self-perception and personal connection posed by technology is overabundance, excess, and the false promise of infinite potential rather than scarcity and lack. In a world where everything is available at-all-times, the temptation and abundance of image, possibility and consumer choice has rendered us insatiable, unsatisfied, unhappy and disconnected.

The constant temporal shift between screen and physical world has effected my ability to not only occupy the present, but also to ever be satisfied with it. In an era marked by both hyper-connectivity and hyper-isolation, Just like heaven can’t wait is a examination of the culture of commerce we inhabit. The series serves as a mirror to our smoothed-over, technologically-driven psyche, blurring the lines between individual identity and consumerism. Weaving a tapestry of fragmented narratives and folding commercialism inward by adopting the sleek rhetorics of visual advertising photography, my pictures question how ego and identity are shaped by commerce and desire. How much of our desires are truly ours? How entangled are we with the economy of things? Who are we in a complex world governed by consumerism? Is personal connection and desire ever not mediated by the soft power influence of commerce? Is enough ever enough?

The individual works in this series take form as sculptural prints that evoke the machine-made and mass-produced, and follow my interest in both subverting and embracing the languages of commercial, fashion, and product photography. Oftentimes blurring the lines between art, design, and commerce, these works consider the intersections of consumerism and ego, and the connections between longing, selfhood, influence, and purchasing power.

The images, videos and installation itself not only become physical proxies for longings and feelings of absence and disconnection, but also reveal the thinness, flatness, and emptiness of what seduces us on screens as the images are made to occupy physical space. With cutouts and interventions in the image surface, the large-scale picture panels will be lined up in physical space. The viewer will be able to walk between them and around them, while the laser cutouts in the prints allow other pictures to be seen through the holes depending on where the viewer is standing (see installation renders examples).

Joseph Desler Costa's colorful and surreal photographs, films and installations combine personal narrative, art-historical references, pop-culture characters, logos and the glossy aesthetics of commercial advertising to reveal the humor, absurdity, and psychological complexity of the images and stories that permeate contemporary culture.