My practice explores these impacts using a variety of media—painting, drawing, textiles, artist books, photography, video, and installation—through formal vocabularies that include landscape painting, botanical illustration, portraiture (particularly of women), and geometric abstraction. I think of my work much in the way that I think of my own experience as the daughter of immigrants—mobile, border and boundary crossing, and often contingent.
I have taken drawings and paintings off paper and canvas and moved them to digitally printed fabric destined to hang as large-scale theatrical backdrops or to be upholstered onto furniture easily found in a middle-class Latino home in 1980s MacArthur Park. Those same drawings and paintings have also been animated for use in videos about the relationship between landscape and armed conflict in Colombia, and they have been shrunken to fit on nail art decals. I have also worn those decals in video works where I perform pointed exaggerations of women's work: the making of an unlikely arepa or wry reenactments of commercialized visions of Latin femininity found on Telemundo. These shifts in modality (sometimes radical) have opened novel creative pathways for me and lent my practice an undercurrent of restlessness that can often make my work difficult to categorize.
Recent Bodies of Work
One recent body of work revisits visual and material culture created at the intersection of 19th-century colonialism and botanical research—maps, painted travelogues, and scientific illustrations. This work was inspired by my immersion in studies of native birds, flowers, and plants created by botanical explorer Alexander Von Humboldt (1769–1859) during multiple surveys of the Americas, as well as paintings by Albert Berg (1825-1884) and Frederic E. Church (1826-1900), such as those depicted in Berg's series of engravings entitled Physiognomy of the Tropical Vegetation of the Magdalena River Valley.
Another recent body of work, Cumanday: Beautiful Mountain, is a combined love letter and eulogy for Colombia's tropical glaciers. Large-scale, mixed-media paintings of the glaciers combine landscape watercolors evocative of the 19th-century Romantic Era with collaged fabric, rhinestones, and sequined appliqués of birds, flowers, and butterflies. This work unpacks the myths and folklore surrounding Andean volcanic glaciers such as the Nevado del Ruiz and Volcán Santa Isabel and their personification as elders or "beautiful ones," so named by Colombia's Muisca people. This mythic personification contrasts with their diminishment—geographic and notional—due to climate change, extractive industry, and urbanization.
My work proceeds from a painted base layer evoking painters like Frederic Edwin Church, whose painting Heart of the Andes was a sweeping homage to these landscapes. The pieces in Cumanday immediately interrupt that Euro-centric way of looking at these sublime landscapes by introducing collaged textiles in patterns inspired by traditional Andean textiles or the infographic color-coding of climatological heat maps. The layer of sequined appliqués and fringe tassels connects the works to traditional ponchos or folkloric costumes as well as to contemporary fast fashion.
If the painted base layer originates in my engagement as an immigrant painter eager to lay claim to certain notions of painterly craft and lineage, the layering of traditional and "cheap" prefabricated textile motifs—all sourced from Downtown LA's fashion district—evokes other, more troubled claims to tradition and lineage: Indigenous groups whose borrowed myths and erasure undergird certain strains of Colombian national mythology; the textile workers in maquiladoras across the globe whose barely remunerated handiwork provides my work with its signature texture.
Technical Methods
Since graduate school, I have employed watercolor and ink media either in layered works on paper, as stand-alone drawings, or as watercolor paintings on paper that I collage onto larger canvases. As part of my Cumanday series, I also made a series of small watercolors called This is Dedicated to the One I Love (Collection of Living and Deceased Glaciers), which record the disappearing chain of glaciers in the style of Colombian artist Manuel María Paz, who set out to catalog and document all the regions in Colombia as part of the 19th-century Comisión Corográfica. These thirteen washed-out and loose watercolor paintings are a small gesture that hopes to reflect both pride in the ambition of the Comisión Corográfica and sorrow at the current state of what they sought to document.
I have also consistently made video works to sequentialize the layered and often maximalist characteristics of my painting and drawing. The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil uses a simulated newscast in the style of Telemundo—and a combined English and Spanish script cut up à la William S. Burroughs—to capture how women are spoken of in Latin American history. In Intercambio, Super 8 film capturing my family's travels across the United States in the 1970s is juxtaposed with stock Super 8 footage of an American family traveling across Colombia around the same time; the piece's editing literalizes the notion of cultural exchange even as it prefigures my future trajectory as a Colombian American. Latin American Stuffable (Arepa) plays with notions of domesticity, labor, and sexuality through the mechanics of making an arepa, a tortilla-like dough often filled with meat and eaten in Colombia.
Artistic Philosophy
Through these and other projects, I have worked toward answers about how painting might remain relevant not just to thorny questions of history, culture, and environment but also to my personal recollection of heritage, immigration, and identity. I have found enormous tactical and aesthetic value in the multidisciplinary approach that is core to my practice—incorporating painting, textiles, video, drawing, and installation—but I also take undeniable pleasure in iterative mark-making, cutting, and layering, as well as in my flâneuse's journey through archives and bargain bins in support of my work.
Each of these projects has been a gift that has allowed me to explore new methods of visual storytelling. I would argue that the traditional painterly demands of my practice, coupled with the requirement that I follow procedural aspects through to their often unexpected conclusions, have essential application to questions about painting's role at a moment when the medium is under pressure from changing practices, expectations, and technologies. As I continue to develop my work, I remain committed to exploring these themes at the level of not just ideas but of the brush and canvas.
- Carolyn Castaño (Spring 2025)