http://www.lamagassociates.org/
Artists:
Castillo
Willie Robert Middlebrook
Eloy Torrez
Maureen Selwood
Saturday June 27, 2:00 pm
LA Municipal Art Gallery
4800 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027
323 644 6269
June 27, 2009
I am Speaking Today at the last 2009 C.O.L.A. Conversation with the Artists
June 18, 2009
June 12, 2009
Review on Buzzine.com!!!
http://www.buzzine.com/2009/06/weaves-and-extensions/
Weaves and Extensions
Castillo at Tarryn Teresa Gallery
See and download the full gallery on posterous
Steven Irvin
Contributing Writer
Perhaps like a salon gone wild with an over-inflated advertising budget, Tarryn Teresa Gallery in downtown Los Angeles is taken over by monstrous hair pieces. A Crenshaw district wig shop stripped down but hopped up on steroids. Heavy metal and hair: remnants from the Bride of Frankenstein set run amok. No, the irony is in the strength and the subtle theme of this show by local artist Castillo. As caricature-ish and large as these hair installations can be, it is the order of the bad hair day that makes them work and sets them off — weighty yet with sheer elegance styled with thoughtfulness and meditative deliberation.
Hair, the very visible essence of the wildness within us, is teased but still tamed here for the viewer of the exhibit. The scale of the work is at odds with the containment and control of it and its core element, synthetic human hair. These situations have contradictory and dynamic, layered effects.
This viewer is easily freaked out by monumental figurative sculpture. Keep me away from the Lincoln and Mt. Rushmore monuments, Valle de Los Caidos, The Statue of Liberty, Christ the Redeemer and all rest. Hey, some people are scared of clowns. The two installations in the main space are placed a bit too close, and you have to squeeze between them to fully enjoy and inspect them. Getting so close to the massive hairballs of Ecliptic Eccentricity is almost disturbing, viscerally jarring and disorienting to the degree of pacing around a Lilliputian’s Gulliver or a prone 50-foot woman’s head. The eclipse becomes complete when looking at the piece along its length where the fifth platinum blonde giant orb blocks the view of the other four black ones, and vice-versa from the other, less navigable side. Ecliptic, that is, except for the few dangling tresses that hang unceremoniously from each globe, as if teased by some mad apprentice comb-slinger. Eccentric reminds me of similar work by the artist at the Junior Art Center at Barnsdall many years ago. Also ironic, and timely, that Castillo was selected by the city of Los Angeles as a C.O.L.A. art fellowship award-winner this year.
A single industrial hoist ring at a ceiling joist hooks the other focus in the same room. Doubled over and elegantly twisted over itself, Strand’s shipping-grade rope covers most of the room after cascading back to the ground in an unraveling display stretching across the floor. With a vague reference to Rapunzel, Strand invites whimsy and play but also issues warning and second thoughts about rifling straight through its blown-out-of-proportion intimacy. Yes, the rope instantly transfers industrial properties and uses to most personal and human ones; suddenly it’s just fairytale auburn dirty strawberry hair, albeit larger than life, and you just have to hold back and stare in wonder, trying to place it in context. Playing the scale trick, however, seems to be an after-effect conveyed by the static physicality of the work and not merely a deliberate attempt by the artist to fool you. Depending on the attitude of the substantive material and the disproportionate disposition of the viewer (such as mine), there remains plenty of curly wiggle room for respective reactions.
Divinia is an installation in the back room. A column of nylon, or some other synthetic cord, falls from the ceiling to the floor and, again, fanning out to the outer reaches. The strings encircle a small pile of black hair on the floor: afro-like, coarse black hair. Orishas and sacred goddesses and rituals come to mind, and although it is hard to truly enter the piece, the very rare name can be defined as heavenly, divine or beloved. Simple yet all encompassing, the transparency of this subject resonates an ethereal hollowness while silently holding indeterminate weight.
Castillo is not an artist obsessed with just hair, but a human obsessed with scale and its inherent power over other humans. She has worked with other materials and properties to similar effect. Her marks are Herculean yet also delicate extensions of primitive and human physics. Furthermore, the artwork regroups inherently messy elements into columns of order and stasis. The show runs through June 18th.
June 11, 2009
My Book Won an AWARD!!!!
International Latino Book Awards 2009
http://lbff.us/latino-book-awards
Best Arts Book – English
The Journey of Frederic Edwin Church – Through Colombia and Ecuador – Pablo Navas Sanz de Santamaria – Villegas Asociados S.A.
2ND Place: Line: 7 Elements of Art – Jane Castillo – Crystal Productions
June 4, 2009
Art Scene Review
http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles2009/Articles0609/CR0609.html
CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS
June, 2009
Jane Castillo, “Excentricidad Eliplica (Ecliptic Eccentricity),” 2000, synthetic hair balls, 36 x 36 x 36”.
Having graduated from the Claremont Graduate University ten years ago, Jane Castillo has reached the success or failure point often mentioned by the school’s founder and mentor, Roland Reiss. Castillo is now an official success story with this month’s mini-retrospective and an installation at the “C.O.L.A. 2009” exhibition at Barnsdall Park. Meanwhile, Tarryn Teresa Gallery showcases her career-making “hairball” theme. For Castillo, who is from Columbia, hair is a marker of identity and gender; hair places you in the cultural hierarchy based upon the preferred color and straightness: you have either high hair or low hair. To comment upon the large role hair plays in the life of its owner, Castillo makes huge “hairballs” of densely curled hair, formed painstakingly by hand, and then hung on ropes from the ceiling. The “hair” is as artificial as the semiotic meaning of hair types, and, depending on its color, one ball can knock the others about. “Ecliptic Eccentricity” is a series of five large hairballs, four black and one blond, a re-designed pendulum. The blond hairball is on the end–the position of power. It can knock the black ones around. The hairballs reappear in tiny drawings that can go unnoticed by visitors. They are stopped at the door. The room is filled with a cascade of thin strands of white nylon rope. The shimmering fibers drape like a protective veil, barring access to a twelve-foot high cone of tiny black hairballs, each striving to rise to the top. There is nothing natural in Castillo’s work. Hair is a statement of artifice, truly an object of culture (Tarryn Teresa Gallery, Downtown; Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Hollywood).
–Jeanne Willette
June 2, 2009
OMG!! Another LA Times Review!!
LA Times June 2, 2009
ART REVIEW
COLA 2009 an accessible brew in Barnsdall Park
Castillo
Municipal Gallery
‘BROWN SUGAR’: Part of Castillo’s installation depicts the artist as a crowd of young women, each dressed in a burlap sack.
E-mail Picture
The nine winners of L.A.’s Individual Artist Fellowships serve up an accessible brew in Barnsdall Park.
By David Pagel
June 2, 2009
This year’s exhibition of artworks by the winners of the city of Los Angeles’ $10,000 Individual Artist Fellowships is better than ever. The sculptures, videos, photographs and one whopper of a painting by nine artists deliver a satisfying mixture of ambition and accomplishment. In nearly all the pieces, these qualities play off each other in ways that make for lively exchanges and leave plenty of room for viewer participation.
Although no theme unites or defines the diverse objects and images that are very simply installed in the rabbit warren of awkwardly proportioned spaces at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, most of the multilayered works address the relationship between the individual and the group.
That’s a big, wildly general idea filled with great possibility. You are able to savor each artist’s installation as a show unto itself or to see it as a part of a whole.
Related
· COLA 2009
Better yet, do both. Art, after all, is one of those rare things not consumed or used up when experienced. Instead, it replenishes itself and anyone who gets deeply involved with it.
Fantasy figures into the installation by the one-named artist Castillo: It consists of 10 floor-to-ceiling columns made of chains and empty burlap bags labeled “Castillo Golden Brown Pure Cane Sugar.” The icing on the cake is a three-part digital print that depicts the artist as a huge crowd of emotional young women, each dressed in nothing but a burlap sugar sack and embodying the cliché that there is strength in numbers and a whole lot more.
Eloy Torrez’s 25-foot-long painting “To Be Continued” is a panoramic landscape, with a series of portraits depicting musicians, pretenders, masked partygoers, dancers and kids — folks of all shapes and stripes in search of something out-of-the-ordinary. It’s hard to know who is with whom, which makes Torrez’s work an apt representation of life in polyglot L.A.
Malleability is at the heart of Shirley Tse’s floor and wall sculptures. Made of polystyrene, polyurethane, foam core and cherry veneer, each belongs to her “Quantum Shirley Series,” a cartoon-style fusion of physics, ethnicity and self-portraiture. Each playful piece proposes that dumb luck sometimes makes as much sense as any logical explanation.
To make his understated wall works, Joe Davidson uses ordinary strips of cellophane tape, which he layers into shallow bas-relief sculptures that depict ghostly mountains. Even better is his 8-by-12-foot floor sculpture, in which thousands of tiny toiletry bottles have been cast into urethane foam forms. The grid resembles an architectural model of a futuristic city or an upended window display from which all the trademarks and labels have been eliminated, like the flesh from the bleached bones of a beached whale’s skeleton.
Natalie Bookchin’s “Mass Ornament” stands out as the exhibition’s most sustained meditation on individuality and anonymity. With a keen eye for detail, a terrific sense of timing and a killer instinct for editing, she has clipped and combined hundred of vignettes from YouTube and set them to the soundtracks from two 1935 films, Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers” and Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” Bookchin’s deft selection of highlights is awesome, a powerful instance of making something great from the stuff at one’s fingertips in the Digital Age.
To watch the split-screen extravaganza is to feel as if you are at once enjoying a god’s-eye view of a vast, everyday parade of vulnerable human beings and also an intimate part of a democratic drama that is deeply moving.
In another gallery, Bia Gayotto’s video installation “The Sea Is Not Blue” evokes the romance of melancholy by suggesting that the instantaneous access of global telecommunications is no antidote for loneliness.
Artifice and reality play poignant perceptual games in David DiMichele’s clever photographs of tabletop dioramas and Maureen Selwood’s enchanting videos. Similarly, Willie Robert Middlebrook Jr.’s hauntingly beautiful abstractions appear to be made of liquid light that has somehow turned fiery, putting you in mind of heaven and hell and everywhere in between.
Overall, one of the best things about all the works is that they never presume artists inhabit some special world apart from everyday reality or are anything other than ordinary folks and regular citizens. Such a down-to-earth attitude goes a long way in explaining their art’s accessibility, which enhances, rather than distracts from, its power.
calendar@latimes.com
OMG!!
ART REVIEW
COLA 2009 an accessible brew in Barnsdall Park
Municipal Gallery
‘BROWN SUGAR’: Part of Castillo’s installation depicts the artist as a crowd of young women, each dressed in a burlap sack.
The nine winners of L.A.’s Individual Artist Fellowships serve up an accessible brew in Barnsdall Park.
By David Pagel
June 2, 2009
This year’s exhibition of artworks by the winners of the city of Los Angeles’ $10,000 Individual Artist Fellowships is better than ever. The sculptures, videos, photographs and one whopper of a painting by nine artists deliver a satisfying mixture of ambition and accomplishment. In nearly all the pieces, these qualities play off each other in ways that make for lively exchanges and leave plenty of room for viewer participation.
Although no theme unites or defines the diverse objects and images that are very simply installed in the rabbit warren of awkwardly proportioned spaces at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, most of the multilayered works address the relationship between the individual and the group.
That’s a big, wildly general idea filled with great possibility. You are able to savor each artist’s installation as a show unto itself or to see it as a part of a whole.
Related
Better yet, do both. Art, after all, is one of those rare things not consumed or used up when experienced. Instead, it replenishes itself and anyone who gets deeply involved with it.
Fantasy figures into the installation by the one-named artist Castillo: It consists of 10 floor-to-ceiling columns made of chains and empty burlap bags labeled “Castillo Golden Brown Pure Cane Sugar.” The icing on the cake is a three-part digital print that depicts the artist as a huge crowd of emotional young women, each dressed in nothing but a burlap sugar sack and embodying the cliché that there is strength in numbers and a whole lot more.
Eloy Torrez’s 25-foot-long painting “To Be Continued” is a panoramic landscape, with a series of portraits depicting musicians, pretenders, masked partygoers, dancers and kids — folks of all shapes and stripes in search of something out-of-the-ordinary. It’s hard to know who is with whom, which makes Torrez’s work an apt representation of life in polyglot L.A.
Malleability is at the heart of Shirley Tse’s floor and wall sculptures. Made of polystyrene, polyurethane, foam core and cherry veneer, each belongs to her “Quantum Shirley Series,” a cartoon-style fusion of physics, ethnicity and self-portraiture. Each playful piece proposes that dumb luck sometimes makes as much sense as any logical explanation.
To make his understated wall works, Joe Davidson uses ordinary strips of cellophane tape, which he layers into shallow bas-relief sculptures that depict ghostly mountains. Even better is his 8-by-12-foot floor sculpture, in which thousands of tiny toiletry bottles have been cast into urethane foam forms. The grid resembles an architectural model of a futuristic city or an upended window display from which all the trademarks and labels have been eliminated, like the flesh from the bleached bones of a beached whale’s skeleton.
Natalie Bookchin’s “Mass Ornament” stands out as the exhibition’s most sustained meditation on individuality and anonymity. With a keen eye for detail, a terrific sense of timing and a killer instinct for editing, she has clipped and combined hundred of vignettes from YouTube and set them to the soundtracks from two 1935 films, Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers” and Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” Bookchin’s deft selection of highlights is awesome, a powerful instance of making something great from the stuff at one’s fingertips in the Digital Age.
To watch the split-screen extravaganza is to feel as if you are at once enjoying a god’s-eye view of a vast, everyday parade of vulnerable human beings and also an intimate part of a democratic drama that is deeply moving.
In another gallery, Bia Gayotto’s video installation “The Sea Is Not Blue” evokes the romance of melancholy by suggesting that the instantaneous access of global telecommunications is no antidote for loneliness.
Artifice and reality play poignant perceptual games in David DiMichele’s clever photographs of tabletop dioramas and Maureen Selwood’s enchanting videos. Similarly, Willie Robert Middlebrook Jr.’s hauntingly beautiful abstractions appear to be made of liquid light that has somehow turned fiery, putting you in mind of heaven and hell and everywhere in between.
Overall, one of the best things about all the works is that they never presume artists inhabit some special world apart from everyday reality or are anything other than ordinary folks and regular citizens. Such a down-to-earth attitude goes a long way in explaining their art’s accessibility, which enhances, rather than distracts from, its power.
Posterous | Re: My Solo Show got REVIEWED in today’s LA TIMES !!
OMG!!! Another review in today’s LA Times!!!!
www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-cola2-2009jun02,0,4126599.story
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