PAULA CASTILLO | Approaching Distance
July 18 - August 12, 2008
Opening Reception | Friday July 18, 5-7 pm

Contrasting the starkness of metal with the lush immateriality of the world, I use generative patterns and structure to draw parallels between the fluid and solid forms of life: portraits of motion within a sense of place. In the mountains that surround my home there is a confluence of two rivers. Here, the steady seasonal change co-mingles with a larger phantom change: the crushing and upward buckling that formed this lower edge of the Rockies...dynamic forces that moved hydro plates perpendicular to the long axis of each mountain and trench. How do we calculate these distances of change...how do we feel connected to them when everywhere all the time it is gone? I think of this for ourselves as well: How do we get to here from there? How do we end up as ourselves? How do we imagine the entire shifting places of our childhood and our children, of the way the light shone on your face on that one particular day in that one particular spring in that one particular hemisphere? How do we hold on to that last wave goodbye?

This body of work attempts to reconstruct these ephemeral conditions- a deconstruction of infinity, the smallest of spaces: from the lateral flowering speed of a splash caused by a small stone dropped in water to the way life ‘borrows’ the flesh it sweeps over. It is not the material, but the thing.... and the thing here is the sense of belonging revealed in the “neither here nor there” of the world. The “right” place is not an inert and fixed place; it is a place of movement, it is the universe as one long transient signal. READ MORE