Castellanos’ work are incisive, and invite complicated conversations through their rich simplicity—where she’s sewn isn’t perfect by natural parameters, nor are her depictions photorealistic, but they’re elegant and refined.
Alone With Her Head presents precise and intricate line work juxtaposed with bright fabrics on bare-bones muslin. Each of the 23 works in the exhibition are quirky, thoughtful meditations on the fleeting moments that make up the human experience. Castellanos’ quilts reflect a specific feeling or moment in strangers’ lives as interpreted by the artist, and by extension, a celebration of the small and uncomplicated; that which makes us human. She makes a note of these moments in passersby's lives or her own, sketching them in a notebook or on her phone before transferring them to a digital software, only to print and trace them onto to the eventually-stitched muslin.
The works’ minimalist aesthetics don’t preclude them from being considered labor-intensive or raw in the ways we’ve come to expect from textile art. Despite this, Castellanos’ work are equally incisive, and invite complicated conversations through their rich simplicity—where she’s sewn isn’t perfect by natural parameters, nor are her depictions photorealistic, and yet they radiate a natural elegance. Every vignette is given the same care and attention dedicated to the more complex conversations present in Castellanos’ body of work: aging as a woman; social connotations of one’s “prime” and feeling as though one has missed or failed to reach it; a misunderstanding of textiles as docile and home-y, along with that of delicate fiber work as weak and lacking sophistication.
Alone With Her Head, like most of Castellanos’ works, doesn’t give us a face to find our own in, though unlike most of her pieces she doesn’t present us with a semblance of a face at all. All one knows is that they’re looking at a person with their weight against a chair, gazing out of a window and occupying one moment in a comfort of their own making. Whether they’re comfortable is up to interpretation. Pieces such as After (which depicts two people presumably pillow-talking) and It Takes a Real Man To Wear Pink play on Castellanos’ cheeky sense of humor as it pertains to sex and gender; Haiku, the one piece in the exhibition which features text, is a devastating realization that we may be alone in our heads, but we still occupy a space in society.
For Castellanos, “alone with her head” is a nuanced ethos. For one, she’s a self-identified Outsider artist living with Bipolar disorder and Grapheme-Color synesthesia who pivoted to textile art to grapple with the simultaneous onset of cerebral ischemias and the loss of a decades-long career as a scientist. To be alone with her head isn’t simply the capitalist-bohemian, “clean-girl” mindset that younger, post-modern generations tout on social media platforms as the key to happiness. Instead, it’s an intentional and process-focused ritual that’s blossomed into an emerging art career. Even the most complicated things come in delicate packages—they usually do. Castellanos’ reflections aren’t more than they seem for the most part. The works in this exhibition exemplify a subversion of what persistence and prioritizing emotional well-being not only looks like to others, but what it feels like to the one processing the state of their existence.
Statement by Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco
Curation by Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco
