carolyn castaño
señorita school graduate
Navigationthings i likeUser login |
Some Shows I'm In
Vanitas Prints Installation View
A view of the Vanitas installation at S B London. Inspired by Pop art, poster art, and design. It was the first time I took an image of my work, in this case photographs that I made to go with the Vanitas video piece, and altered or re-processed them into poster like prints. I liked the idea of taking an older work and making something new with it. Kinda like recycling. The prints are individually sold on Etsy.com.
Señorita School Prints on Sale at Etsy.com
Señorita School goes to Etsy.com. Etsy is a website which allows artists and craft folks to sell their handmade goods on the internet. I've set up shop and hope to sell small editions of prints and t-shirts designed by yours truly. On Etsy, I have a series of prints I made for a show at S B London last year called Video Works. The prints are inspired by pop art and poster art and feature imagery inspired by videos I've made. Each print is hand-altered and unique. For more details, Please check out my Etsy store.
A Review in Art WeekIt's Complicated receives a nice review in June's Artweek by Ashley Tibbits
The Conceptual Family, 1995
This early Castaño has resurfaced after a thirteen year hiatus. It was shown in my first ever painting exhibition at the Luggage Store in San Francisco circa 1995, called "Dos Painters from the Mission" with Kenneth Huerta. From there, it was bought by Rene Di Rosa who had it in his home as part of the Di Rosa Collection. The painting was inspired by a family portrait that my dad had of him and his brothers. I wanted each character to resemble Velazquez or Garcia Marquez character. Well now it's back a lovely gallery from Florida has the painting and we are trying to find a home for it. So if you have any leads me write me here.
Review in the LA Times for It's Complicated at Walter Maciel Gallery.http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/
Review: Carolyn Castano at Walter Maciel Gallery In his cartoonish style, Colombian artist Fernando Botero once painted a picture of slain drug kingpin Pablo Escobar as an obese, rooftop-dancing gangster amid a hail of bullets — sort of “Fiddler on the Roof” for the degenerate set. He presented the brutal criminal, once listed by Forbes magazine among the world’s richest men, in his pseudo-Robin Hood guise, dangerous yet cuddly. I’ll take Carolyn Castaño’s version any day. Her new work at Walter Maciel Gallery shuns easy moralizing for the sheer strangeness of modern media celebrity. Los Angeles Times
Another Drug Lord Busted. Another one bites the dust, when officials captured Colombia's most wanted drug lord "Don Mario" aka Daniel Rendon Herrera, while vacationing for Easter at a finca in the northern region of Antioquia. El "don" was surrounded by 300 agents disguised as tourists visiting the town of Manuel Cuello. There are a few things of interest here, the first, Colombians love their fincas, mountain top homes where one could take in nature, relax with family and friends, or if need be, hide from the authorities. They are akin to our cabin in the woods. Also many a drug lord, kidnapped victim, or otherwise hunted person has been caught by folks pretending to be someone else; a band of tourists, a gaggle of catholic school girls, a soccer team, or maybe the red cross might signal trouble in your hamlet. Lastly, the region of Antioquia, where Mr. Mario was caught, is not coincidently also known for it's flowers, beautiful women, and industrious people. I'm continuing my research into the underworld of traffickers and as they say estupefacientes also known as narcotics. Should I paint this guy?
This is some of Don Mario's booty decommissioned by the Colombian police. Some of the toys included 293 rifles, 94 grenades, more than 64 thousand cartridges,11 grenade launchers, sub-machine guns, rockets, hand-guns, and radios.
It's Complicated at Walter Maciel Gallery
It's Complicated is up at Walter Maciel Gallery. To view images of the work, click on the installation image above. I was working away on the paintings for the show in the days leading up to opening. Thankfully the work got done and I was ready to get on with the celebrations. The opening was attended by art world folks, friends and family. Thanks to all those who made the trek out to Culver City. As they say on Southwest Airlines, " Thanks for flying with us." To view images of the opening by clicking on image of folks below.
Oscar Cueto- Héroe and Carolyn Castaño- It's Complicated opens at Walter Maciel Gallery
Contact: Walter Maciel - 310 839 1840, walter@waltermacielgallery.com Gallery 1: Oscar Cueto, Héroe, New Video, Sculpture and Drawings 4 April – 9 May 2009 Walter Maciel Gallery will present two solos shows by Mexico City based artist Oscar Cueto and Los Angeles based artist Carolyn Castaño. The exhibition will be Cueto’s second with the gallery and the first show for Castaño. Cueto’s new show entitled Héroe comments on the universal connection of the contemporary art world. With the use of video, sculpture and drawing, the work focuses on the four leading art powers of the world including the USA, England, Germany and France and their relationship to the rest of the world. The main subject is the world map which is shown manipulated and rearranged to comment on location and power. A series of map drawings done in black ink on vellum plays with the notion of a new world order. The continents are repositioned with the lesser powered locales being physically attacked by the four leading countries. In some drawings the recognizable territories intersect in overlapping patterns to disguise their original form with a simple red stain marking the penetration. Other drawings simply show a world view with some or all of the leading countries removed as if they never existed. Made out of laser cut acrylic, the sculptures mimic the drawings with the eastern continents piercing through the western continents at carefully marked locations. Cueto depicts his tongue and cheek hatred for these super powers as an artist producing work in Mexico, a country outside of the parameters. Initially, Cueto wanted to include China as the fifth super power but omitted it because the progress of its international art presence is still undecided. The drawings will be shown on a light table with the hanging map sculptures overhead. Within the installation hand sewn flags are strategically placed with black coverings on each side to conceal the instant recognition of the country it represents. The only indications of each flag are sporadically placed holes on the surface and the edge of the pole where colors and patterns are carefully discerned. In addition, two videos will be shown projected on either side of the gallery, one displaying a series of moving maps and the other a rock band using cut out maps as their instruments. The video animations are made from hand drawn frame to frame images on a digital notepad putting to motion the line of the corresponding drawings. A series of unframed gouache drawings entitled Brujeria/Witchcraft will be on view in an adjacent space in the gallery. Cueto is currently showing a similar body of work at the Collette Blanchard Gallery in New York. He has gallery representation in his home base of Mexico City where he has shown regularly for the past five years. A series of Cueto’s work was recently acquired by the Jumex Collection in Mexico City. He recently showed at the Festival la Mar de la Música in Cartagena, Spain and he has been included in solo and group exhibitions throughout Mexico. In the second gallery, a show of mixed media paintings entitled It’s Complicated will be presented by Carolyn Castaño. These new works depict portraits of the amorous adventures of Latin American guerrillas, drug lords, presidential candidates and beauty queens. The stories range from the Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar who catapulted a brutal drug trade to the height of geopolitics while falling in love with the journalist Virginia Vallejo to Laura Zuñiga the “Miss Sinaloa 2008” beauty queen who was arrested with her narco boyfriend Angel Orlando Garcia Urquiza for illegal possession of excessive weapons and ammunition on Christmas Eve. The selection of these notorious figures comments on the fascination society has with tabloid images of love, infamy and crime as an escape from the mundane and habitual. Castaño unveils the ongoing human desire for myth and untiring need to adore our folk heroes meeting global fandom, glamour and digital media. With the use of kitschy materials such as glitter, rhinestones and flocking, the portraits come to life as replicas of 80s new wave poster art. Each of the subjects is shown surrounded by motifs, colors and patterns that relate to specific parts of their biographies. For example, the green and white stripes in the painting of Pablo Escobar and Virginia Vallejo represent Escobar’s favorite soccer team while the camouflage markings seen in the painting of Ingrid Betancourt and Clara Rojas mimic the uniforms of their captors in the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Conflicting fantasies of wealth, honor, dominance and true love contend for the personas of each depicted figure played out in the interpretation of global media. The title It’s Complicated refers to the jargon used in social websites to describe “relationship status” partially as a wink towards the digital networks that increasingly speed these narratives around the globe, but mostly as a realization of the enduring truths of love and desire. Castaño received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001 and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. She has had solo shows at Lombard-Freid Fine Art in New York and at Kontainer in Los Angeles. A selection of her work is traveling in the museum exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is currently on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Day 5- Under the wire and triage in the studio
Day 5 and I'm still glittering. I had a bit of an accident yesterday, well the glitter does not always behave like I want it to. Word of advice to you future glitterers, when using glitters from different companies, watch for the weight and consistency of the different grains. Some chunky glitters might not mix with the fine ones. On my painting of Ingrid above, the fine black crystals got stuck in the bigger white flakes. Live and learn. But did I have to learn this today? Today I will go in and do some triage on the areas that have gone amiss. I'm also running out of supplies, which means yesterday I had to run to my glitter dealer. I arrived all desperate looking, with glitter all over my face. "I need the one pound of the 36P 8 in black please." The guy Alex just gave me a crazy look and was like, "Okay lady, I don't know what you're doing with the glitter, but you are not suppose to use this stuff as makeup"
|
