carolyn castaño

$1/Minute: Strangeways Academy

I was asked to participate in the $1/Minute event by the lovely Ana Llorente of Strangeways Academy. Strangeways is located in Chinatown and is a collective of designers and creative thinkers who work out of one of the storefronts on Jung Jing Road. The event is part of the Los Angeles Design Festival, where artists, designers, and overall creatives were invited to provide a service for $1.00 per minute. The customer can choose from a variety of services, such as business card design, a tajazzle (what is that?) or doggie portrait, a baby announcement, or a t-shirt design. As more of a visual artist person, I thought I could provide quick, yet elaborate drawings for willing and interested customers, more like a mini-me version of my art. In order to assist the designer/creative in executing their order, the customer had to fill out a questionaire and include five things that the designer should know about them. I received a wide variety of responses, some banal, like my favorite color is orange, and others more intimate like, "my father is dying" or "I love religious candles" and "my dog Tom recently passed away". If I received such poignant comments from folks, I was inspired to really include some aspect of their story in my drawing. I began to see myself as if I was one of those old fashioned letter writers who would situate themselves on the street and write a love letter for 5 cents per word. If the customer did not fill out anything specific or very dramatic, I figured I'd give them a drawing with a combination of my imagery; a psychedelic narco novia frolicking in the garden of Eden filled with giant marijuana leaves. Anyhow, I hope my "customers" like my drawings! And yes, I did go over your minutes. oh well. Come see the final creations on June 30th, 6-9 PM.

At Strangeways Academy- I'm working working!: Me & Jessica Fleishman
My drawing for Amy Hoffecker: Tom the Rottweiler
detail of my set up: a dash of orange and chartreuse.

I was commissioned by Eaton Fine Art to make a painting for the new Cosmopolitan Hotel Las Vegas

Electric Yandara

A View of my painting in situ at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

View at the Cosmolitan Hotel Las Vegas

For more information on the Art Collection go to Cosmopolitan Hotel Las Vegas

CARGA goes to Shadowshop at SFMOMA. CARGA, the collaborative effort between Carolyn Castaño and Gary Dauphin seems to be getting some wind, with invitations to participate in artist made ventures in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. The economy is down and gallery sales may be slow, but artists are putting together their ingenuity, smarts, and skills to work by making comodifiable objets that use their art and design skillz to make accessible things. Hence..the CRAFT revolution as witnessed by sites like Etsy.com and the blog Craftzine, the Local Artisans Bazaar at the Fix in Echo Park, featured in the LA Weekly's best craft bazaar, and smaller shops incorporating artist made wares, such as SPECIFIC, run by Brooks Hudson Thomas, artist turned entrepreneur. At SFMOMA, Shadowshop will be featuring CARGA's t-shirts with soccer all stars- Los Inmortales. Soccer immortals such as Brazil's Pele, Argentina's Maradona, and Colombia's El Pibe. Also featured at Shadowshop will be the Narco Novia tote, a carry-all tote for your narco girl needs.
Shadowshop at SFMOMA: a picture of shadowsop at SFMOMA. A CARGA tote on the left.
Shadowshop at SFMOMA: 5th floor store within the museum. Is it art?
Pele T-shirt ( Women's large in white)

From the SFMOMA website:
Shadowshop is a temporary, alternative store and distribution point, organized by artist Stephanie Syjuco and embedded within the museum's fifth-floor galleries. While operating as an actual mom-and-pop-style store, Shadowshop is also a platform for exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work. For almost six months, Shadowshop will feature hundreds of local Bay Area artist products, give museum visitors access to a wide variety of affordable wares, and provide a snapshot of a vibrant and energetic art scene.
See more T-shirts after the break.

Asesinados United

Press Release
June 29, 2010

Exhibition:

Asesinados United by Carolyn Castaño

Reception: July 10, 2010, 7:00-9:00 PM

PØST
1904 East 7th Place
Los Angeles, CA 90021 USA
213 4881280
new@post-la.com

PØST presents Asesinados United: Works by Carolyn Castaño.

Asesinados United, is part art exhibition, part lo-fi pop-up store and part World Cup closing party. For her one-night show Castaño has created prints and original t-shirt designs that memorialize or re-imagine both soccer greats, as well as players who were murdered at the height of their glory.

The Asesinados United series of prints and shirts considers the role of the soccer player’s image in invoking a fanatical passion for futbol, each face a powerful vessel for locally distinct – yet global – notions of heroism, manhood, pride and financial success. As representatives of their country playing on the world stage, a soccer player’s performance during the Cup has national implications, elevating him to national hero or, in the case of players on the 2010 French national team, reducing them to national embarrassments. Sometimes a player’s performance may even have deadly consequences, as with the own-goal that cost Colombian defender Andrés Escobar his life after the 1994 World Cup. Just as failure on the pitch can cost a man his life, so can too much success, as it was for Thiago da Silva, a Brazilian footballer who was brutally murdered by a jilted ex-girlfriend, or Joe Gaetjens, a Haitian soccer player who scored the winning goal in the US vs. England 1950 World Cup in Brazil, only to return to Haiti a hero and be disappeared by the Duvalier regime.

Running in parallel to the Asesinados, the Inmortales F.C. series will feature recent World Cup players who have made their mark in the 2010 World Cup, or are simply immortal.

Gallery hours are and receptions are 7-9 PM. For further information please
contact HK Zamani or ... at 213 4881280 or ...,
or email new@post-la.com...

PØST
1904 East 7th Place LA CA 90021 USA
213 4881280
www.post-la.com

Panama:Tropical Paradise

Changing the Focus- Latin American Photography from 1996-2005 is an appropriate title for the new exhibition at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach. If you haven't been out to MOLAA, you should. The museum has a new and much anticipated new focus on contemporary Latin American artists, probably you could say of the conceptual bent. The exhibition is organized around four themes- Subliminal Structures, Embodied Identities, Staged Irony, and Individual and Social Violence. The exhibition highlights the artists' response to social and global upheavals and how they have affected Latin America. What is interesting for me, is how we up here in Alta California can view and experience what the world feels like from down there , el sur from these photographs. Some of my favorites include, Jonathan Harker's Panama: Paraiso Tropical, the artist plays with our expectations of the tropical and exotic in postcards featuring the artist himself in mundane scenes around Panama, Luis Molina Pantin's Narco-Arquitecture mansions and fantasy parks around Colombia, Oscar Muñoz in Aliento ( Breath) about the transience of life, the violence and memory of those lost to it, is a beautiful installation of mirrors, that literally requires your breath to be complete.

Bookmeat Benefit Auction for Side Street Projects

Bookmeat is an exciting event benefiting Side Street Projects on November 21, 2009 from 6 pm-10 pm at the Brick Building in Culver City . For those of you not familiar with Side Street Projects, the program founded by Karen Atkinson and Joe Luttrel in 1992, is a completely mobile artist-run non-profit organization, which teaches artists to be self-reliant with workshops such as "Get Your Shit Together" bootcamp for artists, "Best Professional Practices Podcast Series" and the "Equipment Co-op", which provides access to equipment usually too expensive for some of us artist civilians to access. What I find really wonderful is Side Street Projects own resourcefulness, operating out of Pasadena in two restored vintage trailers with a solar energy array, Side Street is completely wireless, mobile, and self-sustaining. I've been wanting to have my mobile studio for years and this is really an inspiration!
The Side Street Project Offices

For the Bookmeat, artists were asked to donate a book that had influenced them or played some part in their art practice. I was having the toughest time trying to think of what to give. I have a wide collection of books and authors who have influenced me in some way. Do I give the catalogue of Lari Pittman's paintings, an artist and mentor who has influenced and supported my work? Or do I give "Smart Women Finish Rich" a very useful book on how to survive capitalism , written for women by a man. Thanks mom! Or Do I something more theory-ish..like say Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, which influenced an earlier body of work? I saw some of the fine examples of artists who had turned in their copies early ( You eager beavers!) and saw the wonderful drawings by Steve Roden and Christopher Russell. A light bulb went off in my head the inscription can be more like an annotation or drawings in the form of annotations......aaaahhhhhh....