Film Screening: Castle of Enchantment
Please join us for the premiere of Castle of Enchantment, a film by Weston Lyon & Karolina Lavergne. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Sterling Wells and the filmakers, moderated by Ana Iwataki.
In the ruins of a once-fabled Los Angeles castle, a painter works beside an abandoned pool while a ghost endlessly rebuilds what was lost. Castle of Enchantment is an excavation of place, history, and the shaping of one's legacy.
Castle of Enchantment is a short narrative film set on the former site of a visionary vernacular residence in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles. Built by Milt Hopkins for his wife Josie in the 1950s, the home—locally known as the “Castle of Enchantment"—was a handmade fortress constructed from salvaged materials from the 101 freeway expansion. It was demolished in the 2010s. The film unfolds in three parts:
1. Archival Introduction – An overview of the castle’s historical and emotional legacy, blending found materials, photographs, and city records.
2. Plein Air Painting – Artist Sterling Wells paints on-site in the Castle’s decaying swimming pool. Shot like fiction, these scenes explore art as witness and process.
3. The Ghost of Josie – A spectral narrative of Josie Hopkins, the woman for whom the castle was built. Embodied by a contemporary actor, her ghost lingers—haunting, rebuilding, and narrating the castle’s forgotten past.
Blurring documentary and fiction, the film is a layered portrait of Los Angeles mythologies
Ana Iwataki is a curator, writer, and PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.
Karolina Lavergne is a Los Angeles-based artist working primarily in text and video. Her practice explores the overlap between still and moving images as a means to contruct-and disrupt-one's experience of time. She holds an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design.
Weston Lyon is a filmmaker and photographer living in Los Angeles. His work has been in exhibition and screened at the Torrance Art Museum, 2220 Arts & Archives, Deslave Tijuana, Human Resources LA, as well as film festivals in the US and abroad.
Sterling Wells (b. New York, NY) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; LAMOA at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, CA; Vernon Gardens, Vernon, CA; Metropolitan Structures, Baltimore, MD; and Lana’s, Brooklyn, NY, among others. In addition to Night Gallery, his work has been presented in group exhibitions at MOCA Tucson, Tucson, AZ; the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Western Australia; EPOCH Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles, CA; AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles, CA; Harkawik, Los Angeles, CA; and American Medium, Brooklyn, NY, among others. His work is included in the collections of University Hospital, San Antonio, TX; and New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY. Wells has been featured in Frieze, Artnet, Southwest Contemporary, Hyperallergic, Artillery, i-D, and BLOUIN ArtInfo among others. Wells attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018 and was a recipient of a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. He now lives and works in Los Angeles.