Peter Costas
Artist Statement:
“From 2011 to 2016, I served aboard nuclear submarines in the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet as a Sonar Technician. Our deployments were long. It wasn’t unusual to leave home for 7 or 8 months at sea. Fresh food runs out very quickly. 10 days was the average amount of time for anything that tasted natural and of the earth. After that, the concept of freshness became a distant fog. I have spent well over 13,000 hours at sea. I remember maybe 100 of them and that’s being generous. I began printing photographs on various mediums of food about 3 years ago. I was interested in the idea of a rotting photograph. A fleeting memory. Evidence of memories that I previously had available to me but can no longer be translated into my own mind or anyone else’s. During this process, I discovered an allergy that I had not experienced since being a submariner some 10 years ago. But, now as an artist, in my own experimental processes, I had unearthed an old contact allergy to a chemical I hadn’t felt in over 10 years. I became very sick from this series. The allergic reaction I experienced in this process had been a kind of realization or totem for memories that lay dormant in the body. The body remembers even if the mind cannot.”
Artist Bio:
“Peter Evan Costas is a photo media artist who uses mixed media to reconstruct and unearth memories and imagination. Through a combination of lens-based work, sound, sculpture, performance, and painting his work drives to both communicate the veteran experience and to use memory as a catalyst for fiction. Much of his practice relies on eliciting sensory experiences around sound and touch and how they affect our heavy reliance on the visual. Having served on submarines as a Sonar Technician in the US Navy from 2011 to 2016, his personal experience within the military is a constant totem of time, growth, humor, trauma, and secrecy. Peter Evan Costas received his MFA from School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2022 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art (Photography) at Adams State University in Alamosa, CO. He is represented by FLXST Contemporary Gallery in Chicago, IL.”