Jackie Castillo and I sit cross-legged on the floor of her studio at USC’s Roski School of Art in Downtown Los Angeles. Castillo, dressed in a scale of layered grey fabrics—cotton, linen, wool—is camouflaged with the slate concrete walls. She is preparing for her first solo exhibition, Jackie Castillo: Gutting, at As-is, a modern and contemporary art gallery in the Pico Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her images, installations and prints surround us: Black and white film photographs drape the length of the walls and delicate intaglio prints lay propped up on wooden benches. Her work documents physical spaces, sights observed from the sidewalk, as if through the lens of a memory. A lens liberal enough to capture the truths obstructed by the immediate moment. Though Castillo stands out of view in her photographs and installations, she is nevertheless present, both in the spaces they document and in the deafening silence they amplify. “It’s not autobiographical work,” she reminds me. She pauses, then giggles, “or maybe it is… It’s on my mind.”
Castillo grew up in Santa Ana, California. Her parents immigrated from Guadlajara, Mexico with her four oldest siblings in the late eighties. At a young age, Castillo, the youngest of six, came to know borders as not just physical barriers, but mental ones. Her mother was a domestic worker, and took a position working as a live-in caretaker for families in Newport Beach so that Castillo and her older sister could attend the prestigious public high school in the district. She describes the transition from the comfort of her diverse and working class childhood community to the alienating, manicured mansions of Newport Beach as “culture shock.” In these homes, she learned how to become invisible: “a lot of silencing,” she explains, “hiding our voices, moving around very quietly.” This silence was so deeply impressed upon her, that she is still finding her way out of the shadows a decade later, reflecting them back onto the canvases of her work. “I always come back to it… trying to make these silent moments be just as important as… where the mark is, or the building is,” she says.
In Gutting, two Polyptychs of black and white photographs are stitched together and hung horizontally parallel to one another in juxtaposition. The bottom series shows interior white walls in a working-class home. Aside from the door frames and the closet door, the room is vacant. The series placed above documents the tornadoed insides of a home renovated to be flipped, tossed on a lawn in Pico-Union. Castillo mirrors the layout of the room from below, interrupting the images with cut outs of the door frames and closet. Castillo’s choice of angle also provides an alternative perspective to the scene, she explains: “a displaced window shutter becomes a ladder of ascension, a warped awning transforms into a road forward, and kitchen cabinet voids lead to unexplored possibilities.” She processes the film with reticulation, a method by which hot water is used to shock film after it’s been developed at a cooler temperature, creating a break in the surface of the image that resembles a heavy grain. “You have all these wooden sharp edges, remnants and detritus of this house being flipped,” she says describing her reasoning, “and I think it was enhanced with this texture. Always going back to: this is a material. This is a material photograph. These are parts of homes.” The scene she captures is the silent story that takes place before the Zillow ad—the quiet and violent shifting of a neighborhood.
The subjects of Castillo’s installations are often pre-informed by the spaces she knows they will be presented in. She is a site-specific artist, but unlike many who have come to define the field (Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Patricia Johanson), she cares that her work is in harmony with the history and contexts of the spaces in which they will be viewed. She is providing commentary and excavating buried narratives rather than owning the space herself. She investigates the silent yet ever present story of buildings, and the complex relationships of the people who build them, buy them, rent them and those who live in proximity to them. She explains, “Site specificity matters to me, it matters to me what building I’m showing in, what city I’m showing in… the history of those places.” For Gutting, the images she includes were all taken in As is Gallery’s neighborhood of Pico-Union, a neighborhood she herself has called home since she received her BFA at UCLA in 2016, and still today, as she manages USC’s photo lab and completes her MFA at Roski.
In her work, Castillo uses multilayered visual language to explore the historical contexts of the spaces that she exhibits in. For Nomad, a group exhibition at Torrance’s Financial Center, she affixed transparent adhesive photographs to the windows of the gallery, creating natural light boxes. On one window, a photograph taken by Castillo of a small home in suburban Torrance; on the other, an archival document outlining the aspirations of Torrance developers. On the wall between the windows is an archival ad from the 1950s promoting the development of these affordable cookie cutter family homes. Just below sits a step stool with print-outs of the house’s current Zillow ad (a nearly million dollar price tag). Through the transparent photographs in the window, you can see outside onto the street and on the floor beneath the window, the sunlight casts a warped projection of the images onto the ground. Castillo has considered this spectrum of experience and each layer is an intrinsic facet of the piece. Again, while the physical installations and her photographs are immediate, she is deliberate in her consideration and uncovering of the silent, transparent, and transient images that exist within the space.
Growing up, Castillo didn’t have easy access to cameras, and believed because she lacked a gift for rendering, she wasn’t destined for art-making. In 2011, Castillo attended Orange Coast College as a literature major. To fulfill her undergraduate art elective, she enrolled in an introductory photography class: “In some ways, [art] was a requirement. Then it just became a passion.” At community college she received a technical education in film photography under the tutelage of influential professors like Rick Steadry, Eve Luckring, Walter Urie, and Leslie McCall. In subsequent years, when she wasn’t working various jobs to support herself, she was walking through the suburbs of Orange County, documenting the landscape. Just as Ed Ruscha studied Sunset Boulevard, or Bill Owens catalogued Suburbia, Castillo amassed an archive of Orange County.
She finished her degree at UCLA, where art history and theory began to help her synthesize thoughts she had long mused on. She latched onto the psychogeography of French artists of the sixties, and ruminated on the way architecture and built environments affect human emotion. For Castilllo, the scenes of suburban Southern California she had been capturing over the years —front lawns and sidewalks—became an investigation into the relationship between infrastructure, urban development, and collective memory, particularly with regards to the psyche of the working class. “ I feel like the choices that people make, on the exteriors of what they can control sort of reveal different levels of struggle or alienation that kind of manifests in that way sometimes,” she says, glancing over a pile of her black and white images.
Her professors at UCLA also encouraged her to look at her own archives with a renewed interest: “I spent a few quarters with Barbara Kruger and her ability to edit down work, it stayed with me…I learned to isolate what I did, what I’m really trying to say with this piece and how to communicate that.” She also expanded her practice to include installation, influenced by her professor Catherine Opie. “I really started thinking about scale, and what scale does to the image and the visceral, the somatic experience that scale can provoke, really trying to activate the three dimensional space,” she says, standing to adjust the tape that adheres an eight-foot working print to her studio wall.
Importantly, Castillo’s art education made her aware of art movements she could relate to both culturally and thematically. “It wasn’t until I was at UCLA and was reading a lot of Chicano/a literature and seeing a lot of these experiences being reflected back at me that I was like, wow, this is something I need to be thinking about and working with.” Just as the process of storing a memory informs its function, Castillo’s personal and technical processes imbue her work.
Hours into our conversation, I realize, it’s hard to wrap up. Castillo is warm and generous, and despite the coarse and striking textures of her work, she exudes a kind and easy joy. She attributes this joy to her art practice: “ There’s the physical act of it. I think there’s a kind of presence that happens in the act of photography, that always reconnects you to yourself, to that very particular moment, for really taking the photograph, that you are there in that moment, this body is there. And to me, that is invigorating… when I am doing that, it’s like I woke up again.”
Through her practice, Castillo radically reclaims her voice. A voice that was once silenced and now, is never deaf to the silencing of others. Jackie Castillo: Gutting will be on view at As is Gallery October 30 through December 18, 2021.