Costa’s practice, initiated in New York in the early 1980s, is grounded in a sustained interrogation of the ontological limits of the image and the object, and of the slippage between represented space and lived, physical experience. From its beginnings, the work situates art-making within a ritualized framework, one that resists purely formal or symbolic resolution. His subsequent use of heterogeneous materials—cast forms, hand-blown and cut glass, mirrored surfaces, neon and incandescent light, natural illumination, linguistic elements, and volatile substances—operates less as eclecticism than as a structural strategy. The inclusion of live fire, combustible agents, and human blood foregrounds processes of transformation, expenditure, and risk, insisting on a material economy in which meaning is inseparable from bodily and temporal commitment.