Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring Visiting Fellow, Ruben Castillo

Ruben Bryan Castillo is a visual artist and educator investigating themes of intimacy, queerness, archival history, and the body using a range of media including print, drawing, sculpture/installation, and video. They are currently Assistant Professor of Art at Skidmore College. Learn more about Castillo and their work at their website: https://rubenbcastillo.com/

In Castillo’s recent work, they investigate, recontextualize, remix, reposition, restate, and replay images of intimacy, archival history, and the body to find traces of queer contact. Print media is at the core of their practice. They construct images using a variety of traditional and digitally manipulated methods to portray scenes or objects that evoke physical, emotional, or psychological responses. Starting with drawing or photography, they are curious about how pictures metaphorically transform and mediate narratives around queer subjectivity. They are drawn to the slow pull of the quiet and mundane world of domesticity, particularly a world built through a relationship with someone (or something) else. Castillo’s recent work highlights material qualities that can be perceived as tactile or felt, creating moments of sensual tenderness and fantasy. They are 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 like 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 a medley, reflecting the unpredictable shapes a life can take.

This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two weeks prior and up to the event.