Alex Belardo Kostiw’s publishing practice, drawing closer to parts and possibilities of everyday reality. It spans
artist’s books and zines, and spatial books, which transform a book into a site.
Rooted in visual communication and print, these works deal in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms.
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There between Light and Shadow
Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL)
Two-person exhibition with Youree Kim, curated by Leo Yiwei Wang
Ceramics; cyanotypes on off-cut French paper, Stonehenge paper concertinas, and dyed mulberry paper (Hanji) concertinas; digital prints on transparencies; bookbinding thread
My installation in the dual exhibition consists of five parts:
Act 1 (Atmospheres)
Act 2 (Fist breaking open)
Act 3 (It stops me to see it)
Colophon (The Hour)
Notes (Often, I forget, you know)
This process-driven work attempts to capture the timelessness of dappled light filtering through the trees during the summer using cyanotypes on a variety of paper forms; in meditative text on transparencies; and through the fragility and weight of suspended ceramics, a medium that is the result of an atmosphere of heat.
Ultimately, dappled light (and whatever it stands for) continues to elude the work. The ceramics cast rows of shadows like illegible lines of text. The transparencies feign intangibility. The cyanotypes try repeatedly and iteratively. Visitors were invited to contact me to receive parts of the installation after the show.
Here are the remnants of sunlight—light that has leaned in through windows, unfurled across walls and floors, and dappled the ground. It stops me to see it, light playing on shadow. Couldn’t I pick up and hold the pieces, the lines, the countless pinhole pictures of a sun, leaking—stretching—drifting?
But I can’t even hold the hour. I can’t close my fist around such a fleet-footed thing any more than I can bear the heaviness of light.
Here are my attempts. I’ve stopped many times to watch light cut the shadows of the hour. Our dark doppelgangers wink and sway to our score of long calls, creaky growing, insistent erosions, and other frictions.
Untroubled by any of it. In every time, in every place.
Shadows change resemblances. No matter how my heart is beating, light remains outside my fist. Going no where, with the hour, while I am only here.
Pakiramdam
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, is an installation that 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.
In pursuit of the tiger
Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL)
Installed in To Be Continued..., curated by Sofía Sánchez Borboa, Sophie Buchmueller, and Denny Mwaura
Monoprints on kitakata, risograph prints, inkjet prints, cane, leather, nails, linen thread, found index drawer, wood box, off-cuts of paper and wood, pencils
An interactive, site-specific installation conceptualized as a library, In pursuit of the tiger explores the formation of knowledge through (1) wandering/wondering, (2) encountering and taxonomizing phenomena, and (3) making sense of one’s senses. The installation relies on readers’ encounters with it to develop meaning, gesturing toward knowledge as open ended and living, rather than static or fixed—just as easily lost or discarded as re/discovered and re/made.
A collection of monoprint pages suggest a tiger moving through a landscape; readers leave and take notes for each other based on their encounter with the images. Meanwhile, readers can browse a set of over 500 prints of abstracted photos of flora within 3 miles of the gallery. They may define what the images signify and categorize them in an index drawer; or pull cards from the drawer for a divinatory reading; or recategorize cards at will. Nearby, readers may flip through a concertina collecting words that suggest internal and external landscapes, to build their own story by selecting a few words to “read” as a narrative.
Marginalia guides readers through the installation. As strangers interact with it, they shape a shared reality and collaborate to build new and nebulous knowledge.
I’m calling from a great distance
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.
Salita
Evanston Art Center (Evanston, IL)
Installed in Kitchen Table Stories, curated by Melissa Raman Molitor
Woodcut prints and graphite on wall
“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.
books
are
︎ Alex Belardo Kostiw
Alex Belardo Kostiw brings together poetic elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms in their artist’s zines, books, and spatial books, works that explode and transform aspects of the book into a site. Rooted in firsthand observation, multifaceted research, and an iterative approach, Alex frames familiar moments in reality as worthy of wonder. Brief and tender, quiet and dense, their work invites the reader to slow down and read closely. Reading becomes multimodal and intuitive, while the story itself resists complete unravelling. Throughout their practice, Alex centers the human impulse to seek, expand, and transform how we connect with the everyday, others, and ourselves through storytelling.
Alex has exhibited at numerous comics festivals and art book fairs internationally. Their work is in such collections as the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, MassArt Zine and Comics Collection, MICA Decker Library, Pratt Institute Artist’s Books Collection, RISD Artist’s Books Collection, Tufts SMFA Library, and Yale University Haas Arts Library Special Collections, among others. They have led workshops and given talks on print- and zine-making at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Wende Museum, Culver City; Suffolk University, Boston; and several community art spaces.
Alex is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also teach risography at Spudnik Press and design publications for art and culture institutions. They live with many reams of paper and two cats.
contact
︎now / future
Slight Fictions, solo exhibition at De Pree Art Center, Hope College, Holland, MI.past
Comics, Zine, and Art Book Fairs
MICE, Boston; Pittsburgh Art Book Fair; Detroit Art Book Fair; Pretty Good Fest;
TCAF, Toronto;
Seattle Art Book Fair;
Comic Arts Maine Portland;
Multiple Formats Art Book Fair, Boston;
Boston Art Book Fair; Chicago Art Book Fair; Independent Artist Book Fair, New York;
Jersey Art Book Fair, Jersey City, NJ;
LA Art Book Fair (virtual); Autoptic, Minneapolis; CAKE, Chicago; CALA, LA; CXC, Columbus, OH; DiNK, Denver;
SLICE, St. Louis;
Zineland Terrace, Toronto.Exhibitions (*solo/two-person) There between light and shadow, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago*; Pakiramdam, Co-Prosperity, Chicago*; I’m calling from a great distance, The Annex at Spudnik Press, Chicago*; Kitchen Table Stories, Evanston Art Center, Evanston; The Anthropology of Motherhood, Carlow University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; The Velocity of a Page, Tephra ICA, Tephra, VA; Art of the Risograph, Chicago Design Museum.
Residencies MASS MoCCA (2027); Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Residency (2023–24); In Cahoots Residency (2022); Spudnik Press Artist Residency (2016–17).