Digital video installation - 10 min.

Dimensions vary

Artist Statement:

My work examines the invisible but persistent forms of state power control onto the human body and the built environment. Using digital video and collage, I explore the biopolitical landscape shaped by industrial pollution, environmental negligence, and systems of power that regulate life. *Forever chemicals*—toxic, uncontainable, and sanctioned by regulatory complicity—serve as both subject and symbol in my practice. They are the residue of a system that manages harm while displacing accountability, embedding long-term contamination into our lives and our environment.

By merging painterly sensibilities with digital aesthetics, my goal is to create immersive visual experiences that evoke both beauty and unease. The work lingers in the tension between seduction and disruption, asking how we can we continue to live, feel, and care within structures that promise progress while harming our health. Various voices come in to either explain, critique, or exhort the viewer, not to offer answers, but a space for reflection, resistance, and poetic attention. "You are not a puppet which life pushes around..." says Alan Watts, "The real deep down you is the whole universe!"

With this work, art becomes a counter-force—an act of witnessing, disruption, and refusal within a society shaped by systemic profiteering. 

Bio:

François is an international award winning multi-disciplinary artist working in video, digital collage, and installation. His practice explores the quiet violence of state power and the biopolitical systems that govern bodies, health, and the environment with a focus on the impact of technological progress and capitalist excesses on our natural world.

Through a layered digital aesthetic, he investigates the presence of *forever chemicals* as both material and metaphor—symbols of how harm is embedded, sanctioned, and made invisible by structures of control.

He made the Lumen Prize Shortlist for the Moving Image Award. He has shown works at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Geneva International Film Festival, CyFest in St Petersburg, Beacons Festival in Skipton UK, The Boston Biennale, HUBweek Boston, the Museum of Science Boston, The MIT Museum, the Boston Convention Center, the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Installation Space gallery, Tufts University, Atlantic Works, and performed at First Night Boston, Boston CyberArts, Lynn Arts, and Pixilerations. Some of his video work was featured at the Swissnex dome for HUBweek Boston, Virtual Territories at the Geneva International Film Festival, Beacons Lumen Festival in the UK, and at Illuminus Boston. He is a member of the Soundscape Visions collective, where he has been awarded multiple grants from the Lynn Cultural Council.

François is an artist and educator with a Master’s degree in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He teaches photography, video, editing and post-production. When he isn’t in the studio or out exploring nature, he volunteers at Salem Arts Association as an artist member and exhibition Chair.

www.francoisdecosterd.com

Reception: Friday, August 8, 2025, 6:00-8:00 PM

Exhibition Dates: August 9 through September 6, 2025

Open Saturdays and Sundays from 12:00 – 6:00 p.m.

Salem Arts Association Galleries, 159 Derby Street, Salem MA 01970

Contact info@salemarts.org with questions.