All You Need To Know Right Now
5th May - 4th June 2004

Alexander Costello works with a wide range of materials, approaches and techniques both as a solo artist and in his numerous collaborative projects, For the exhibition at T1+2 Costello produced a series of large-scale site-specific paintings concerning themes such as linguistic ambiguity, escape, and the brusque contingencies of everyday life. Borrowing his imagery from Italian comic books, the artist has added to each of these vignettes - of speeding cars, women, cowboy punch-ups and ejector seats - two texts. Bluntly tautological or plainly idiotic, these appended snatches of language critically disrupt the visual images' "obvious" meanings, reframing them whilst being themselves affected by the highly stylised pictures over which they are placed. The resulting juxtapositions of text and image generate a complicated play of linguistic and visual signs, a volatile interchange which is by turns puzzling, interrogative, comical and melancholic.

T1+2 also screened Costello's performative video piece "I Don't do Painting".

All You Need to Know Right Now was Alexander Costello's first solo exhibition. He is currently showing at Gallerie Une, Neuchatel, Switzerland and will be exhibiting at The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand in July 2004.