Art on Campus - Carolyn Castaño
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
CAROLYN CASTAÑO
Tropical Geometries: Quetzal, Azul y Naranja, 2017
Carolyn Castaño
Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper
51 x 40 inches
Courtesy of Walter Maciel Gallery
Location: Liberal Arts Building, Foyer, Second Floor
Carolyn Castaño's work explores the aesthetic and social landscape of a hybrid Los Angeles through mixed-media paintings. In the series Tropical Geometries, landscape and pattern are used to re-imagine ideas of modernity, progress, and identity in the Americas. Landscape painting, mapping, cartography, and botanical illustration co-exist simultaneously in these works with patterns and free-flowing shapes inspired by Pre-Columbian and indigenous textiles, such as those of the Wayuu in Colombia. At the same time, elements of Neo-Concrete painting and 20th Century graphic design interrupt the viewer's contemplation of what some might see as a sublime, prelapsarian natural world by interjecting, fracturing, and bifurcating the visual conventions of the traditional landscape. By putting abstractions and patterns on the same plane as painted landscapes, the artist hopes to not just capture the historical simultaneity of cultures and ecosystems, but also a sense of their possible futures.
Carolyn Castaño is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work in painting, drawing, video, and mixed-media installations has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2013), the California Community Foundation Getty Fellow Mid-Career Grant (2011), and the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant (2011). Castaño has had solo exhibitions at Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles and Lombard-Freid Fine Art, New York. She was recently the subject of a career retrospective at the Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University, Carolyn Castaño: A Female Topography 2001-2017. Her work has been featured in We Must Risk Delight-Twenty Artists from Los Angeles at the Magazzino Di Sale, curated by BARDO-LA, a collateral exhibition of the 2015 the 56th International La Bienniale di Venezia, in LACMA's Futbol: The Beautiful Game, and in the critically acclaimed Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, which traveled to the Museo Del Barrio, New York City and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. Her other exhibitions include LA Now: Emerging Artists, Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris; Liquid Los Angeles: Contemporary Watercolor Painting in Los Angeles at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; Semi-Precious, The Public Art Fund, New York; and International Paper, an exhibition of drawings at the Hammer Museum. Castaño holds a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Fine Art from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture. She has taught at UCLA's School of Art and Architecture, Chapman University, Cal State University San Bernardino, and Riverside Community College. She is currently Assistant Professor, Painting and Drawing at Long Beach City College, in Long Beach, CA.
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