Wed-Thu: 11AM-5PM | Fri-Sat: by advance appointment
Wed-Thu: 11AM-5PM | Fri-Sat: by advance appointment

Adriana Castro

Nominated by UIC The Female: Her intimate / public role, her sexuality, and the origins her selfhood are my obsessions – what I think about all the time. As an artist, I often let what obsesses me guide my process of art making. I work within these themes because as a Latina female, I was taught to be submissive in society, to cover up sexuality, and swallow my opinions. My urgency to unlearn these rules is in an effort make room to see, hear, and experience what it means to be female in this century. My art therefore works to define a new set of rules that liberate the female, empower the female, and defamiliarize the female’s position in the world. I produce drawings and paintings out of thread and oil paint on canvas. These mediums are slow, thus making it possible for an intimate relationship to develop between myself as the maker, and the artwork itself. My art is normally a singular object pictured within an empty space, which is the central idea, that being synonymous with the contemporary female as a central figure inhabiting all space and no space simultaneously with no boundaries to transgress, no discourse to refute. I work with non-tangible yet experiential themes of the female body: the self, the flesh, the mind, and its experience that finds a second body through familiar objects. This representational body functions as a metaphor illustrated in my dreams and attractions. I dream of the ocean and sky as sites where all sense of self is lost, and upon waking up, my art houses myself. I always feel the urge to find significance in life. Image: Y (Handmade Book), 2014.

LAUNCH Invitational

2015 - 2016,
Artist Resident