Visit with Ruben Castillo
Working with personal and public archives, Ruben constructs images through traditional and digitally manipulated methods, exploring how pictures transform and mediate narratives around queer subjectivity. For Art on Paper, Ruben has created a site-specific installation incorporating three of his etchings and woodcuts hung amongst hand-cut Phototex vinyl decals. Take a look behind the scenes of the making of the work below.
When thinking about collage, scrapbooking, and personal notes, I wanted to imagine what clippings I might choose to archive. I pulled together a variety of materials that I had been studying or thinking about, and considered what possibilities emerged when brought together.
Ruben Castillo
Drawing from a larger body of work focusing on a wallpaper sample book, I wanted to create a unique pattern. Working from a photograph I took of a rhododendron bush, I used etching as opposed to woodcut or screen print – mediums typical in pattern printing – to focus on the image and the flowers’ symbolism.
Ruben Castillo
My recent work highlights material qualities that can be perceived as tactile or felt, creating moments of sensual tenderness and fantasy. I’m interested in both human and non-human traces left in everyday ephemera. Projects consist of urgent and gestural mark-making, collaged wallpaper patterns, and arrangements alongside other textual artifacts. Documenting these minor moments and objects builds an archive of feelings, quietness, and suggestive closeness. Pillows, plants, wallpaper patterns, handwritten notes, clothing, and corners occupy these images as figures in a scene. Allowing these elements to collide implies a sense of archival discovery and emergent possibilities while reconsidering historical narratives associated with queer life. The installations of prints sprawl out, strung together as medley, reflecting the messy shapes a life can take.
Ruben Castillo
