THIS
IS
Alex Belardo Kostiw’s self-publishing practice, exploring the unknown parts and possibilities of the self, human connection across time and space, and the nebulous shape of reality. Rooted in visual communication design and printmedia, these works deal in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms.

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Sa Salita—Stories He Took with Him


26 pages, stab-stitch binding with fold-out pages, laserjet, 8.5 x 5.5 inches

A collection of fragments of my grandfather’s stories set alongside drawings of his hand gestures. Each page unfolds to reveal illustrations, bits of personal photos, and reproduced woodcuts that reference Filipino folktales and myths, my grandfather’s life and migration, and the dining table where I would sit across from my grandfather and listen. Together images and texts describe a dozen stories and imply many more.























the same heart


8 pages, one sheet folded, risograph, 4.25 x 2.75 inches

Sometimes, a family is less like a tree and more like a cadena de amor. This book is a letter to my roots and vines.



















Enchiridion


36 pages, saddle-stitch binding and accordion fold, risograph and laserjet, 10.25 x 5 inches

The mythology of a trickster-god known as “Cate Blanchett,” in four parts: lexicon, cosmogenesis, epiphany, and artifacts. Enchiridion explores the arc of a god’s multiplicitous existence, the language of worship, and mythology as a means to understanding phenomena of the self. Manipulated and original images, tropes relating to divinity, and motifs repeating across multiple narratives imagine “Cate Blanchett” as a figure between reality and infinite possibilities—a reflection of ourselves. Finalist for the Broken Pencil Awards.







book/mark I: A Name


12 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 7 x 2 inches

First in an on-going series of bookmark-shaped books, each on aimless thoughts that keep coming back to me.

A Name is a brief, personal reflection on what it might mean to make a person. With images that allude to Greek mythology, Penelope, “the name without a girl,” is my idea of a daughter.











book/mark II: Wendr


12 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 7 x 2 inches

Wendr is a spell, cast on me by a stick I saw on the ground. I’ve never been able to forget it. Meanwhile, somewhere, a witch wanders, wandless...






book/mark III: 6 Wings


12 pages, accordion fold, reduction woodcut, glue, 2022, 7 x 2 inches

6 Wings reimagines the mythological multi-limbed, winged Geryon, whom Hercules murdered for his red cows. Few depictions of Geryon have survived antiquity. To echo that, making this book, a reduction woodcut print with collaged covers, involved destroying the print matrix and parts of the prints. The book embraces Geryon as a fugitive body—shifting, unknowable, beyond our grasp.








The Word Sm*t


40 pages, staple-bound, laserjet, 5.5 x 4.25 inches

“Eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings. In every erotic encounter there is an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire. Octavio Paz

Brief descriptions of random Tumblr posts after the platform’s ban on adult content and of Google search results for kinky images are imposed on a grid sparsely populated with vague fleshy drawings. The result feels out the edges of erotica, the extent to which eroticism is a personal perception, and the role of withholding in desire.

















Endless Distances


28 pages, staple-bound, 1st edition offset, 2nd edition risograph, 2 x 4.25 inches

“Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
Robert Hass

Three women in different worlds tell themselves stories about the ones they love, obstacles to their love, and whether these obstacles can be surmounted. How much of love is will and imagination? The book’s panoramic form frames physical, emotional, and temporal distances in the characters’ lives.








Between Us


12 pages, staple-bound, laser, 6.5 x 4.5 inches

When two share a vision, how do they know they see the same thing? A strange occurrence will draw a couple closer together, or pull them apart.
A version of this story appeared in the anthology Linequality.














Are You Even Listening?


20 pages, accordion fold, risograph, 3.25 x 2.75 inches

One asks the question, and we spiral into the other’s ear in search of an answer, from the surface level, to the cellular level, and all the way down to our airy underpinnings.











birding—unbirding


12 pages, flutter book, offset with risograph cover, 6 x 3.25 inches

A woman’s grief spills into her sense of self and way of life. The book is legible backwards and forwards; remembering and forgetting her grief are enacted by the direction of reading. The cycle transforms her again and again. 









Butter Dust


16 pages, stab-stitch binding, offset on vellum, 4.25 x 3.5 inches

Dust floats in the rectangle of light falling through a window. Fifteen daydreams occur, moving between abstraction, metaphor, and sensation.














Sigils of Trouble Sleeping


10 pages, one sheet folded, risograph, 5.25 x 2.75 inches

A list of troubles with sleep is paired with images of bed linens. These were the basis for sigil designs printed on the interior side.

Sigils are used in spell casting and are symbols of intention. These sigils are meant to ward off each source of trouble, paralleling the transitional natures of magic and sleep.














[Sappho]


28 pages, saddle-stitch binding, risograph, 8 x 5.25, edition of 36

An essay comic about reading Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho If not, winter and the visual presence of its lost fragments. Drawings translate spreads from Carson, with matching page numbers.










Inventory :: Recollection


Saddle-stitch binding in hard case, accordion fold, laserjet, edition of 1

This two-part artist’s book documents a man’s life through his possessions. A folded list provides brief descriptions of items in his home and their history. A single-signature pamphlet shows unlabeled rubbings.

Collapsing the volume and values of objects, the book interrogates the significance of legacy and the marks a life makes on things, places, and people.
















Chatter

10, coptic binding, woodcut, 10 x 16 inches, unique

A gatefold book collecting ten woodcut prints in which “chatter,” or texture. In turning the pages, various characters are placed in dialogue with each other. Conversations between them are composed and recomposed.








Box Actaeon


Paper object, risograph


In Greek mythology, Actaeon was a noble hunter with a pack of loyal dogs. After hunting with friends, he wandered out alone and came across Diana, goddess of the hunt, bathing in a pool. Furious at being spied on, she transformed him into a stag. Fleeing back to his friends but unable to speak, Actaeon ends up torn apart by his own dogs.

Nested boxes house the myth. Readers piece together the story by turning the inner box while viewing images through successive openings. The structure echoes the act of peeking and of being trapped in a different body. It layers and segments the story, aligning reality and magic to shift images of transformation into view.














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Pakiramdam


Installation at Co-Prosperity (Chicago, IL), digital prints on organza and paper, acrylic paint, vinyl, wood, fishing wire
Photos by Colectivo Multipolar, courtesy of Co-Prosperity


Pakiramdam, a Tagalog word roughly meaning an intuitive or empathetic sensing of something or someone, explores how geographic and temporal distances can be collapsed by moments of recognition, a sense of kinship, or a memory. The project encodes my family’s history of immigration and migration, the in-betweenness of mixed-race identity, and embodiments of hybridity along the way. It interrogates how we locate ourselves, not just within place and time, but in relation to others; what it means to be present to others in spite of physical absence or distance; and notions of authenticity and synthesis in relation to cultural and personal identities.

Like spirits, we come together, overlap, and drift past each other in the narrative spaces of the project, a space in Chicago and in the countries of our minds.
















I’m calling from a great distance


The Annex, Spudnik Press Cooperative (Chicago, IL), screen prints, laserjet prints, and xerox transfers
Photos courtesy of Spudnik Press


A series of varied-edition screenprints and an artist’s book relate the communications between a lighthouse keeper and an interplanetary explorer. A dive into wanderlust, solitude, and homesickness, the work uses the vastness of oceans and space to illuminate the smallness of humanity and the fragility of our bonds with each other.

The prints are divided into two sets. One is a sequence of a woman turning around in an increasingly figurative landscape. The other depicts planets and alien environments. The icons and gestures, which cross over between the prints and the book, become the intimate language of the characters’, and the audience’s, shared experiences. The solo exhibition culminated my work in the Spudnik Press Artist Residency.













Kitchen Table Stories


Curated by Melissa Raman Molitor
Evanston Art Center (Evanston, IL)

“The Kitchen Table Stories exhibition is a celebration of stories shared by local artists who identify as Asian, South Asian, and Pacific Islander. Artists were asked to share the stories that have been passed down to them from ancestors through family and friends, and create work that reflects ther own lived experiences. The result is an exploration of the intersections of immigration, citizenship, race, culture, social identity, multigenerational relationships, and family history. Melissa Raman Molitor, curator

This collection of woodcut prints, Salita, is a personal study of storytelling that nourishes us across generations, geographies, and cultures. The prints depict stories my grandfather told me at dinner when I was growing up—Filipino folktales mixed with his anecdotes—and how he told them—his gestures as he spoke and his words as I remember them. I ate his stories up, until they became part of me. And through these prints, I retell them, and they become part of you.













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︎ ALEX BELARDO KOSTIW
Alex is an artist, graphic designer, and educator in Chicago. Like dense knots, their work invites intuitive reading—and resists full unravelling. They frame moments of uncertainty in the everyday, making space for perceptions of reality to shift.

Through poetic narratives, imagery playing on unreadability, and layered formats, Alex approaches storytelling as a way of un-knowing. Their work quietly disrupts the familiar to enable the reader to discover new meanings in realities personal and shared. Their process often involves capturing, fragmenting, reframing, and/or combining different understandings of various phenomena, such as reimagining birds as stories based on their names, or creating a metaphysical sense of place by juxtaposing drawings from memory with parts of old photographs. Through their practice, they aim to destabilize the sense that knowledge is fixed, granting readers the chance both to perceive other possibilities and to embrace what is fundamentally fluid and unknowable. Alex’s explorations include myth-making, in-betweenness, modes of inter/active reading, and books as installational projects.

Alex teaches design foundations and approaches to narrative in Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as printmaking at Spudnik Press, a community print shop. They are also the publishing arm of an art gallery and an independent designer focused on publications, visual identities, and illustrations that center historically marginalized voices in art and culture.

Alex holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from SAIC and a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago. They live with many reams of paper and two cats.
NOW / FUTURE
2023–24 HATCH Residency.
September 29, group show opening, Chicago Artist Coalition.
September 30–October 1, MICE, Boston, MA.
October 14, St. Louis Independent Comics Expo, St. Louis, MO.
October 29, Portland Zine Symposium, Portland, OR.

PAST
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs: Boston Art Book Fair; Chicago Art Book Fair; Independent Artist Book Fair; LA Art Book Fair (virtual); Seattle Art Book Fair; St. Louis Small Press Expo; Autoptic, Minneapolis; CAKE, Chicago; CALA, LA; CXC, Columbus, OH; DiNK, Denver; MICE, Boston; TCAF, Toronto; Zineland Terrace, Toronto. Exhibitions (*solo): Co-Prosperity, Chicago*; The Annex at Spudnik Press, Chicago*; Evanston Art Center, Evanston; Carlow University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; Tephra ICA, Tephra, VA; Chicago Design Museum. Residencies: In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).

COLLECTIONS
Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Zine Collection at the University of Chicago Library, Zine and Comics Collection at the MassArt Library, Decker Library at MICA, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Pratt Institute Artist’s Books Collection, RISD Artist’s Books Collection, Haas Arts Library Special Collections at Yale University.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?