Dust to Dust

The Threads of Fate

Josh Bolin, Mishka Colombo, Robert Costello, and Willie Wayne Smith

January 26 - March 11, 2018

Mark-making is intimately linked to the acts of conjuring, divination, and the reimagining of events. It is a form of speculative thought that allows us to rethink who we were, are and who we want to be. It is magical-thinking that instead of being escapist, is inwardly critical. An action that becomes all more important as we think ourselves, yet again, on a precipice.

The Threads of Fate, the inaugural exhibition at Dust to Dust, features four artists who, through painting and drawing, create speculative spaces for engagement with the self and the world. Robert Costello constructs layered spaces that overlay simplified symbols over delicately hued gradients, shadowy monoliths, and unraveling nets. Costello states these constructs are based on the plasticity of human perception and are thus as provisional as any socially agreed on view of reality. Mishka Colombo, in a series of illustrations, recreates tarot cards, replacing the archaic symbols with everyday objects in heavily staged situations. Doing so creates a personalized divination deck that is looped - looking out, we find we are looking in. Josh Bolin’s Instagram account is a prolific onslaught of drug addled, cartoonish characters who act out absurd, violent, and hyper-sexed dramas. En masse, they reflect a world view that is infinitely repeating, hellish and addictive. Individually they slow, revealing that each paranoid smile disguises pathos and the darkest existential fear becomes hilarious. Willie Wayne Smith fills and overloads clean-lined coloring-book style paintings with hastily scrawled doodles and stream-of-conscious language. Lists, confessions, and nonsense both respond to and ignore the underlying structured image, resulting in visual concatenations.