Devon Costello’s work is a negotiation between painting and sculpture, where both are associative elements that meet within the language of images. His pieces are clusters or pairs of paintings and sculptures that are placed and hung with a sensibility derived from the artist’s interest in salon and natural history exhibitions, which have more to do with collage than discrete parcels of information. Costello’s practice is as concerned with art and objecthood as it is with non-art modes of display, and is always focused on the communicative power of an accumulation of images.

Swan (2006) oscillates between Realism and Minimalism. A delicately rendered watercolor of a floating swan resides on the upper left while geometric blocks of wood painted in ever lighter shades of blue cascade down the wall to the floor. Costello places a large rectangular piece of particle board there, that serves as both anchor and foil to the wall arrangement. Swan playfully connects-the-dots from Leonardo da Vinci to Carl Andre, hinting at the artist’s vast arsenal of art historical referents.

Glacier (2006) combines a large-scale painting of an arctic landscape (lifted from National Geographic magazine) with pigmented cast-plaster sculptural forms-one sitting atop a makeshift pedestal and the other on the floor. These seem to manifest the craggy glacial landscape via a rhymed call and response between two and three dimensions. Mediating the conversation is a white wooden block, hanging on the wall beneath the painting. The painterly sculptures emphasize the painting as pure imagery- it transcends its support and the picture plane obliterates.