SAN JOSE, CA.- MACLA present Castillo and Mariana Garibay in a two-person exhibition that focuses on ancestry, nature, and form featuring site-specific installation and works on paper. These two artists employ divergent approaches to working with form and landscape in their esthetic pursuit.
Castillos work has hints of ancestral, historical symbolism. She selects her materials for their historical relevance and presented larger than life, embodying multiple layers of meaning.
Her current work is a commentary of the history of capitalism and the role that it has played in her lineage. Her installation Brown Sugar addresses her Columbian lineage that is made up of Pilipina, African, and Spanish, which has a history both proud and unsettling. Little known is the use of slavery in the production of sugar in her home country of Columbia. Representing the many that are a product of that history, Castillo has created a fictitious sugar company logo bearing her likeness, and printed on 440 bags burlap bags stacked high to create a sugar cane field suspended by chains yet anchored by its own weight. 10 sugarcanes placed in rows of two hang from floor to ceiling towering over the viewer invited to walk among them and reflect upon history and its injustices.
A triptych digital photo collage component accompanies the installation with Castillos image in various posed emotions honoring the silent role of woman in that part of history and trade.
Mariana Garibay explores the real and imaginary through her work. These explorations are based on observations of nature informed by science and technology. In her site-specific installation, Mariana has created alternative worlds derived from our own, imaginary landscapes populated by organic and geometric forms, which are at once figurative and abstract. Through a layering of painted wood cutouts, intricately cut translucent paper pieces and soft sculpture she creates a magical environment that reference nature, regeneration, and the otherworldly. These bright multifaceted forms, set within a painted landscape, combine crochet yarn, thread, stitched fabric, and brushed fur that intertwine to emphasize texture, form, and color.
Accompanying the installation are three intimate collages on wood and a large paper diptych, titled Another Place. Mariana continues her exploration of color and form in these shifting landscape compositions. Exploding cell patterns mutate, and petite linear marks combine with specks of cutout paper that reference both floral and cosmic. Creating these images and forms allows Mariana to questions our shifting reality while capturing fragments of our changing world.
Castillo graduated with an MFA in sculpture from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont CA and she received a Bachelor of Arts in Art Education from California State Fullerton, CA. In 2009 Castillo was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and she was in Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA in 2009. Her recent solo exhibitions include Strand in 2009 at Tarryn Teresa Gallery in Los Angeles, and Curve at Bandini Art, Culver City, CA.
Mariana Garibay is currently completing her undergraduate degree in painting and drawing at the California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. She was awarded the CCA faculty Honors Award from the California College of the Arts, and in 2005 she received an emerging artist commission from the Alameda County Arts Commission. Recent solo exhibitions include Life Elsewhere, The Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco, 2009 and Symbolic Translations: Life, Dreams and Memories, de Young Art Center, San Francisco, 2005.