Castillo by California State Univeristy Stanislaus School of the Arts

C A S T I L LO En ta n g l e d , S e l e c te d Re tro s pe ctive

300 copies printed CASTILLO En tangled, Selec ted Retrospective August 22â&#x20AC;&#x201C;September 24, 2016

Art Space on Main Department of Art School of the Arts California State University, Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus

Catalog design and production: Brad Peatross, School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus Catalog printing: Claremont Print, Claremont, CA Catalog photography: Courtesy of the artist. Photographs included are used under the permission of the artist.

ISBN: 978-1-940753-21-8

CONTE N T S Director’s Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Artist’s Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Essay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Curriculum Vitae. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

D IRE C TO R ’S FO R E WORD CASTILLO - Entangled, Selected Retrospective represents a chance to view the work of an incredible artist. The survey of art in this exhibition showcases Castillo’s important works, which deal with issues of identity, gender and obsession. This installation represents a view, which calls into question not only the specific elements of the work in the exhibition, but also the viewer’s ideas of his or her own reality. I have had the great fortune to work with Castillo in the artist’s formative years and watch in amazement to see the work continue to grow and become richer in its meaning and execution. I would like to thank the many colleagues have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. Castillo for the chance of exhibiting the remarkable work, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette for her insightful essay, The School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalogue design and Claremont Print for the printing of this catalog. Much appreciation is also extended to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue.

Dean De Cocker, Director, Art Space on Main California State University, Stanislaus

ARTISTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S STATEMENT Hair as a Metaphor Charged with association and meaning, hair is the subject of my work, embracing the peculiar sacredness of our relationship with hair. It challenges real hair by being larger than life and by presenting it in an unconventional form. Oppositional tensions are made sculpturally with the familiar viewed unfamiliarly. Legends, rituals, folktales, identities, DNA sampling, stereotypes, value, sacredness, care and attachment are centered around our hair. I like toying with the idea of exemplifying something that we have simultaneously control and no control over. Hair growth is a series of reincarnations. Each normal hair lives its full life span then falls out and is replaced like a human generation. The aspect of life and death in our identity with our hair raises numerous questions.These questions are both cross cultural and rhetorical. Semiotically coded, hair as a metaphor embodies its power to both attract and repulse, value and devalue, or become unrecognized weaponry. The work has hints of historical symbolism. Though I manipulate materials, I enjoy maximizing their beauty by presenting them minimally altered yet in no way denying or changing their identity.

Castillo

H AIR AND T HE R E , NOW AN D TH E N By Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette In a culture obsessed with categorization, hair has been a powerful marker, creating a visual trope for gender—long hair equals “female,” short hair means “male.” At a time when the question: “What are you?” has replaced “Who are you?” hair emanates a powerful message, transmitting: “I am…” fill in the blanks. But as ethnicities are mixing and mingling, blurring racial lines, many people contain multiple genetic ripples, spiraling through their DNA, the famous shape of which resembles a curl of hair joyously springing forward. But why, one might ask, is hair so freighted with meaning? Why is hair the carrier of so many messages? Why does hair bear so many semiotic burdens? One can only theorize that, back in the day, all we had for ornamentation was our hair. And we are an ornamental species and undoubtedly the first object we decorated was our own bodies. And what was easier and more convenient to play with than hair which demanded to be dealt with if only because it never stopped growing. Perhaps it is this powerful collective memory of tribal grooming that led to primordial identification and group differentiation that causes such primal reactions of shock and awe when something as apparently harmless as hair styles change. After the First World War, women announced their liberation by bobbing their hair, chopping off feet of tresses, one head at a time, yards of hair, forming glossy stacks that denounced the past. These women were welcoming the new century by asserting themselves as the New Woman, now stripped of hot heavy hair that had prohibited women’s physicality. Men, however, were not ready for statements of freedom, coming from that half of the human race they had ruled for millennia. For them, a woman shorn of her hair was a woman shorn of her virtue. Because there were no beauty salons, women invaded male preserves, the barber shops, seeking out the only place where a girl could get a haircut. No less a literary star than F. Scott Fitzgerald, put pen to paper to write of the enormity of the social change taking place during the 1920s, writing “Bernice Bobs her Hair” (1920) at the peak of American shock and outrage. Once again, hair marked a crossing of a culture Rubicon in the 1960s, when men, conversely, began to let their hair grow long. For the traditional males—and, yes, it does seem to be men who are most obsessed over hair—were disgusted at fellow males giving up their masculinity in exchange for the lesser designator of gender—femininity. After all, was the complaint, how can you tell a guy is a guy if he lets his hair down? As with women bobbing their long hair, men growing long hair was a statement that times had changed. If the Twenties and the Sixties were all about gender, the new century has been grappling with questions of ethnicity and identity that only get more complex as clean lines fade and bleed as people blend themselves into new tribes. The huge hair balls of Jane Castillo acknowledge the giant wad of cultural consternation over something so natural. Defying the social expectations that hair must conform, hair must behave, Castillo bowls out spheres of compacted locks or hangs swinging vines, all composed of (fake) great ringlets. Hair, also known as the “main/mane” is invited to the art gallery to twist and shout, complaining and explaining of the cultural constructs, woven by gatekeepers to keep the Others under command. There is “good” hair, as Chris Rock will tell you, and there is “bad hair,” with “good” hair, usually being straight and blonde and attached to a white head, and bad, usually being dark and frizzy, attached to a dark head. White women are taught to fear the frizz and Black women don’t let you touch their hair. In his 1965 autobiography, Malcolm X recalled his first “conk”:

“This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’—and white people ‘superior’—that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.” The Hair of Jane Castillo, which has its own address—which is the future—refuses to bow its head to denigrating designations. She tosses back that loud and proud crowning glory and lets it be known that the Hair will not be cut or combed or styled. Castillo says, the future is here, be shocked, we are one, our bloodlines are endlessly tangled, like our hair. Can’t touch that. Standing tall as a Latina, with complex ethnic roots, Jane Castillo shakes her head at such narrow and destructive conventions and, like the hair bobbers (not to be confused with head-bangers) of old, cuts loose and puts hair in its place, in your face, asking the museum visitor to re-think the folk meaning of hair, which is, by the way, an extension of skin. Her Brown Sugar series, which predates a similar theme from Kara Walker, refers to the fate of those who did not and do not have the appropriate and favored hair and requisite and preferred skin. Hair that is tight and not light, skin that is dark and not pale, condemns and limits, arouses consternation and incites cries of the negative and the forbidden. Dark skin, dark hair equates to enslavement de facto or de jure. Women, as the Rolling Stone song indicates, are read as tawny sexual objects, not fit for proper jobs and incapable of being proper wives, passed around and passed over. Inspired by a female soul singer, “Brown Sugar” (1969) was a song condemning the sexual exploitation of slave women, while it also celebrates male lust. The (im)moral is that is one’s ethnic and tribal bloodlines that clips the wings, sending the dreams of those born that way spiraling to the dust, lest a dream un-deferred and fulfilled challenge the myth of white supremacy. It is these lines of red that tie one down…but only if you let it happen. Ethnicity can be re-defined and de-defined and liberated from its con-fines when the community comes together and remembers that we are all one. Castillo’s Bloodlines, a communal project, done by many hands and hearts, reminds us that we are, in our primeval state, are irremediably social, that we are intertwined and entangled and entwined, belonging to each other, wrapping around each other. We communicate through a material culture in which things impart meaning, convey messages, speak in codes. But these signifiers, as the artist knows are merely floating and the meaning of materials, whether our own hair or skin or textures or clothes, is malleable. Castillo’s life and art dedicates itself to metamorphosis and transformation in which all terms and all designations are up for re-negotiation and re-consideration. She is testifying. Discarded rags become elegant, regain memories of former lives—all they needed was loving hands, just as the trees of San Jose bloomed with banners of red, shining in the sun, needed to hear the singing songs of shared tales and exchanged laughter. Rejecting the bent stoop of plantation labor, the burlap bags rise, stand upright, become towers of dignity as the bent bodies of women straighten under the sun and they stretch out their brown arms and feel the heat of freedom. If hair is a metaphor for ethnicity, hair is also a signal for a new identity. We can renew ourselves, we can re-grow, new growth is possible. In closing, it is time for us to sing a song, celebrating follicles, those countless signifiers of who-ness and what-ness. In the immortal words of James Rado, Gerome Ragni, who raised their voices in 1967, and sang:

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen Give me down to there, hair, shoulder length or longer Here baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddy Hair, flow it, show it Long as God can grow, my hair

All together now.

A longtime friend and colleague of Jane Castillo, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette, an art writer in the Los Angeles area, is the author and producer of the website Art History Unstuffed and is a professor of art history at Otis College of Art and Design.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Each hairball is a meditation in its creation.â&#x20AC;?

Entangled, Selected Retrospective, installation view, Art Space on Main, Turlock, CA 2016

Goldilocks and the Bear, synthetic hair, thread, 9’ x 6’ x 7’, 1998

Continuous Line, synthetic hair, 12’ x 9’ x 15’, 1998

Desenredada (untangled), rope, chain, synthetic hair, 14’ x 50’ x 40, 1998

“Cascading strands entice beyond the veil.”

Cortes de Rastros (cut traces), rope, chain, synthetic hair, 14’ x 50’ x 40’, 1999

Paísaje (landscape), synthetic hair balls, tumbleweed, 14’ x 3” x 7’, 1999

Cinta (tape), rope, approx. 12’ x 3” x 1’, 1999

Cita (meeting), rice, synthetic hair balls, dimensions variable, 1999

Celestina, rope, approx. 18’x3”x14’, 1999

Excentricidad Eclíptica (ecliptic eccentricity), synthetic hair balls, 3’ x 3’ x 3’ each, approx. 30’ x 3’ x 10’, 2000

â&#x20AC;&#x153;As materials speak, I listen.â&#x20AC;?

Lo Bridge (collaboration with John Outterbridge), rags, dimensions variable, 2002

Curve, paper, chain, dimensions variable (approx. 12’ x 6’ x 25’), 2007

Out Cast (collaboration with John Outterbridge), rags, dimensions variable, 2008

Brown Sugar, (installation view), silkscreened burlap bags, digital printed triptych, chain, dimensions variable, 2009

Strand, rope, dimensions variable, 2009

Divina, synthetic rope and hair, dimensions variable, 2009

Bloodlines, fabric, photoluminescent embroidery, dimensions variable, Parque de los Pobladores, San Jose, CA, 2010

Cityscape, digital print on vinyl, approx. 21’ x 35’, Cerritos College Fine Art Department, 2011

Blank Canvas, P3+, canvas, steel, light, 10’ x10’ x10’, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, LA. 2014

Retrato I, synthetic and human hair, steel armature, 6’ x 2’ x 6’, 1999

Mona, synthetic and human hair, steel armature, 6’ x 2’ x 6’, 1999

Retrato II, synthetic hair, steel armature, 6’ x 2’ x 6’, 1999

Ecliptic Eccentricity (1 of 5), synthetic hair, chain, steel armature, 3” x 3” x 3”, 1999

Strand, rope, dimensions variable, 2009

Hairball, individual drawings, graphite on paper, 2 ½” x 3”, 2001

Strand, rope, dimensions variable, 2009

C ASTI LLO EDUCATION 1999

M.F.A., Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

1993

B.A., California State University Fullerton, Fullerton, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2016

“Entangled, selected retrospective” Cal State Stanislaus, Stanislaus, CA

2014

“Blank Canvas,” Outdoor Installation for P3+, New Orleans, LA

2013

“Castillo,” Phantom Galleries, Los Angeles, CA

2010

“Bloodlines,” Outdoor installation at Parque de los Pobladores, San Jose, CA

2009

“Strand,” Tarryn Teresa Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2007

“Curve,” Bandini Art, Culver City, CA

2004

“Accessory,” The Hive, San Pedro, CA

1999

“la novia (the bride),” Installation Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ continuous line,” White Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ paísaje (landscape),” Installation Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ cinta (tape),” White Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ cortes de rastros (cut traces),” East Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ Value Scale,” White Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ argollas (rings),” White Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

1998

“bolsas (bags),” Dillingham Caples Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ I don’t know,” outdoor installation, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ Goldilocks and the Bear,” White Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ desenredada (untangled),” East Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

“ seguro (lock),” Dillingham Caples Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016