[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog features Carlos Castro Arias’ Mythstories and Los Padres Ausentes exhibit at the LA Art Show.
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L.A. Art Show is very often a fun, funky, dynamic, yet commercial conglomerate of contemporary art. It’s no secret that much of the artworks are statements meant to sell. To its credit, LA Art Show is still full of novel artwork that piques the imagination, it’s just very obviously slanted towards buyers versus existential art-viewing. Carlos Castro Arias came out swinging on the latter half.
Carlos Castro Arias’ Mythstories and Los Padres Ausentes transformed a little corner of LA Art Week into a viewing gallery. Mythstories and Los Padres Ausentes felt like a contemplative speakeasy in the midst of a profitable restaurant week.
Mythstories is comprised of a series of tapestries that explore the intersection of history and myth. Castro’s tapestries leverage popular scenes and symbology of medieval tapestries, and mix into them modern figures and phenomena. The intent with the media is to support viewers’ understanding of current realities, as well as to help us wrest control of our own cultural understanding. In other words, recreation of our social occurrences permits us to redefine how we experience lived history. Myths themselves denote realities beyond logical understanding. Myths are then recirculated to preserve historical thoughts and express them in a way that is, perhaps, more palatable to modern society.
From a sleeping beauty Michael Jackson, to a cauldron full of contemporary politicians, Mythstories leverages the use of religious and political tropes and indelible memorials of the past. These memorials are perhaps so far in the past they are remembered in our collective history as myths. Our own zeitgeists are no different, and no less absurd than mythological creations of yesteryear.
Some myths are so exaggerated that were there no formal record to withstand the test of time, surely they would have been passed down in oral tradition as hyperbolic and merely lore. Or, as Castro interrogates, perhaps, we can learn from them as fables and cautionary tales.
Los Padres Ausentes (The Absent Parents) adorns casts of colonial statues with indigenous Inga beadwork. With casts from actual statues that once stood in public, Castro riffs on the modern debate of what monuments represent, and where do they belong.
Castro is a master at what he has historically done – examining modern discourse in a way that removes us, the viewer, just long enough, just far enough, to understand the agency that we actually have.