Andrea Castillo & Will Zeng: Imagined long before

Andrea Castillo and Will Zeng, DMST Atelier's current featured artists in the duo show Imagined Long Before, available for view from Dec 14 - Jan 31, explore concepts of utopic desire and dystopic reality against the backdrop of everyday California life. 

Andrea Castillo's surreal figures amidst vivid landscapes examine the varied selves we present to the world, while the familiar sites of her home city are portrayed in "Hollenbeck Park" and "Storefront I" in warm, vibrant hues. The attention to detail to objects in Castillo's work shows landscapes as characters unto themselves. This is as true in her depiction of the home in "The Visit" as it is in carefully rendered commercial displays of Sanrio backpacks, Nike shoes and Gucci shirts in "Storefront I", objects of a multicultural city economy. In contrast, the people figured within Castillo’s landscapes are purposefully archetypal, their proportions swelling and shrinking, almost blending into their environments. In an artist statement Castillo writes that her "painted contorted figures act as the interior life of a body": "Utility Planning" uses these contortions to capture the contradictions between the industrialized carscapes of the city, depicted in miniature form at the top of her painting, and the larger-than-life bodies of LA onlookers perched on the ground, whose limbs bloom and distort amidst the summer heat. 

Will Zeng's artwork places cars in focus as a method of interrogating taste, race, and queerness in contemporary LA. Zeng is drawn to the relationship between car culture and queer Asian American masculinity as a nexus of aesthetic inquiry. Cars feature not just as vehicles but as status objects, evoked by  “BOYRACER” which depicts an Asian man in a tank top lounging on a shiny pink new car. The car crash in particular, where these symbols of status, masculinity, and power meet their natural limits, is of special interest in "CRASH I" and "OOPS". “CRASH I” shows the aftermath of a collision, with a red figure turning away from the wreckage. "OOPS" counteracts the hopes of Asian-American assimilation and the "dream life", (Lauren Berlant’s famous critique “Cruel Optimism” comes to mind), represented through bumper stickers — "baby on board”, "proud parent of honor student" — contrasted with the harsh reality of the dented minivan.

Historian Norman Klein writes of Los Angeles as a city "that was imagined long before it was built" (2008), a sentiment echoed by Mike Davis decades earlier in "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles" (1990): "[Los Angeles] is, and has been since 1888, a commodity: something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash ... The ultimate world-historical significance — and oddity — of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism." The promises of LA, whether exemplified by the dreams of its immigrant communities or by Hollywood and technological progress, have always been matched by messier histories of struggle, ongoing gentrification, and environmental disaster. 

Castillo and Zeng are united by their shared interest in the optimism amidst the commodified urban scene, from the perspective of the marginalized: the moments of beauty simultaneous with destruction.