Theo Costantino
Theo Costantino's practice includes drawing, sculpture, video, photography, written works and performance. They have exhibited and undertaken residency projects within Australia, Europe, the UK and USA both in a solo capacity and collaboratively.
Broadly, Theo’s work investigates the representation and memorialisation of the past: the use and abuse of history, the continuing influence of the past on the present, and the ways in which repressed or forgotten material can resurfacein daily experience. They often explores the talismanic power of objects including photographs, which despite their ubiquity often have intense personal significance and are intimately tied to rites of memory.
Theo holds a PhD from Curtin University and has undergraduate degrees in Fine Art and Literary Studies. They received a 2015 Visual Arts and Craft Mid-Career Fellowship from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts, the 2013 Hutchins Art Prize, a 2011 Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award and the 2012 Artsource/Gunnery Artist Exchange. Their work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, Murdoch University, John Curtin Gallery, City of Perth, and City of Joondalup.
They have written prose, libretti and dramatic text; their short story ‘Meniscus’ was published in Global Dystopias, a special issue of The Boston Review edited by Junot Díaz in 2017. A choral work in collaboration with Tim Cunniffe, Requiem for the Heroic Dead,is currently under development. In 2009 they wrote the musical theatre work Heart of Gold, which appeared at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Performance Space and was produced by Hold Your Horses.
They have also written critical texts including the book chapter 'Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive’, which appeared in Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality, and Embodied Knowing, edited by Ann Schilo for Rowman & Littlefield in 2016. They collaborate with Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont as part of the collective Hold Your Horses.
Broadly, Theo’s work investigates the representation and memorialisation of the past: the use and abuse of history, the continuing influence of the past on the present, and the ways in which repressed or forgotten material can resurfacein daily experience. They often explores the talismanic power of objects including photographs, which despite their ubiquity often have intense personal significance and are intimately tied to rites of memory.
Theo holds a PhD from Curtin University and has undergraduate degrees in Fine Art and Literary Studies. They received a 2015 Visual Arts and Craft Mid-Career Fellowship from the Western Australian Department of Culture and the Arts, the 2013 Hutchins Art Prize, a 2011 Qantas Foundation Encouragement of Australian Contemporary Art Award and the 2012 Artsource/Gunnery Artist Exchange. Their work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, Murdoch University, John Curtin Gallery, City of Perth, and City of Joondalup.
They have written prose, libretti and dramatic text; their short story ‘Meniscus’ was published in Global Dystopias, a special issue of The Boston Review edited by Junot Díaz in 2017. A choral work in collaboration with Tim Cunniffe, Requiem for the Heroic Dead,is currently under development. In 2009 they wrote the musical theatre work Heart of Gold, which appeared at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Performance Space and was produced by Hold Your Horses.
They have also written critical texts including the book chapter 'Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive’, which appeared in Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality, and Embodied Knowing, edited by Ann Schilo for Rowman & Littlefield in 2016. They collaborate with Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont as part of the collective Hold Your Horses.
