Above, artist Robert Costanza
Robert Costanza has done an incredibly brave and beautiful thing. He’s laid out his life’s work in his artwork on the walls of the Neutra Institute Gallery and Museum in Silver Lake. The show is closing this weekend, July 3rd, and it’s a don’t-miss event.
15 Cubic Years follows the artist’s spiritual, artistic, and life journey, intimately revealing his trials and tribulations, successes, and failures.
“Initially it was going to be called ‘From the Darkness to the Light,’ because of the new, more spiritual direction my work was taking. I was looking at art as a spiritual path. I was hoping it would inspire artists to be inspired into evolution,” Coastanza relates.
Settling on 15 Cubic Years as a title, the works are less an exhibition than a connected portal through time. It revels in ideas and themes about connectivity and power: human, electric, steam, new technology. His engineering and teaching skills are as much a part of Costanza’s work as is his artistic skill. Connected, indeed.
At the event’s opening June 18th, Costanza’s work was punctuated, much as his personal life is, by meditation and music. Below, the Om Shakti Family.
Curated by Dulce Stein, this wildly exciting and highly kinetic exhibition traces 15 years of the artist’s life and art. Paintings, mixed-media, installations, and a video experience lead viewers around the ample gallery space to absorb Costantza’s witty, science-laced, and meditative works. The exhibition itself moves in a linear fashion, from Costanza’s early educational experiences to working in aerospace, a focus on meditation, an entering into the light of a more human and humane worldview. Note: the works depicted here in this article are not presented chronologically.
A fascination with science and the spiritual, not a dichotomy to Costanza, runs through the exhibit. Above, Costanza’s sculpture “Returning Jurassic.” This piece is also an attempt to create steam using heat generated from the heat of a jet engine. The assemblage used both gas and liquid fuel sources – but not in this exhibition. The piece stands on its own though, as a sculptural work even without the creation of “real” energy. The art’s energy speaks for itself.
The artist’s fascination with the electrification of cities and homes carries throughout his work. He’s buried copper wire under layers of pigment, earth, and gesso and induced current through the wires, taking him 1.5 years to create a literally searing early work. He’s utilized actual power poles for installations and stage sets. Above, this theme is carried in a hyper-realistic work edged with the abstract and surreal in both form and function.
Above, a depiction of Costantza’s experience “moving from the vacuum of a nuclear family into the educational system.” Rote learning and the subjugation of the mind produced little of the energy that fascinates the artist. Rather it was a negative energy space from which his personal positivity later sprang.
Wires, grids, power, energy. Connections.
Below, a video detailing the process of “stream entry” using Vipassana meditation. Costanza learned to create videos on his Mac for a crowdfuding campaign, wherein he pledged to upload this second, enlightening video.
Costanza has worked on and off in the aerospace industry for years. He has termed himself “mesmerized” by the “visual aesthetics” of systems built and used.
“The book that changed everything for me was mastering the core teachings of the Buddha through Theravada Buddhism. If done correctly there are four awakenings,” Costanza relates. Theravada Buddhism is one of two great schools of Buddhist doctrine, one which emphasizes personal salvation through one’s own efforts.
The dynamic of “repulsion and attraction” that the artist feels for the intellectual and literal power grid, is very evident below, as he’s dropped in and out of the industry.
And the bliss continues. “I taught a class on meditation last summer to prepare people for a retreat. I can help people prepare and go deeper. I’m doing this show to get a direction forward. My older stuff is darker, my newer stuff lighter. I’m ready for a new transition, but it’s not crystal clear yet where it’s coming from. Maybe it’s a balance of the two extremes.”
Costanza has started a company, Rocket Buddha, which creates artistic, meditative T-shirts. This may be a new direction.
But the heart of his work? “Assemblage,” the artist says.
And in a way, every piece in this show and every step Costanza takes is an assemblage – of varied techniques and moments that have come before, follow after, and exist only in the present, in viewers’ artistically electrified eyes.
Let’s continue the metaphor. Costanza’s work is electrifying.
Go get connected. Sunday’s closing runs from 5 to 10 pm. At 7:30, Costanza will create a performance that supports this quote: “Is it not an ethical imperative and challenge to create situations that mock, question, interrupt, undermine and subvert the continuum of progress that keeps (catastrophic) things going?” Victor Zamunio-Taylor
Neutra Institute Gallery & Museum is located at 2379 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90039
- Genie Davis; All Photos: Jack Burke
