Elizabeth Castaldo
Together Apart: #Frontier

Elizabeth Castaldo is an artist, printmaker, and bookbinder based in Peekskill, NY and New York City. She has completed residencies at the Center for Book Arts, NYC and Printmaker’s Open Forum. Castaldo received her MFA from SCAD Atlanta where she was a Dean’s Fellow in Printmaking and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. In November 2020, Her solo exhibition, Proximate Magic, was presented at Saint Joseph’s College in Patchogue NY. Her work was included in the traveling exhibition, “Freed Formats: The Book Reconsidered”. Elizabeth organized the exchange portfolio “Earth/Mother” for the SGCI 2020 conference “Puertográfico”.

She teaches printmaking and book arts at Parsons School of Design, Nassau Community College and the Center for Book Arts NYC. Her work is held in many private and institutional collections including the SCAD, Yale University, The University of Alberta, and Carnegie Mellon University.

ARTIST´S STATEMENT

I work with collage, drawing, and printmaking to create works on paper and artist’s books exploring the connection of feminine sensuality to nature and its manifestations in modern culture. I am working with the idea of the divine feminine as a power that I seek to recognize in myself while reconciling it with the pressure put on me as a woman and a mother living within a patriarchal society. How can one subvert cultural limitations and tap into a deeper consciousness, centered in love and sustainability, rather than in domination, as a way to care for self, others and the earth? How can we tap into holistic ways of healing from the harms of an extractive society? I commune with the work through the meditative process of creating repetitive hand drawn and collaged patterns, layering drawing, hand pulled prints, watercolor washes, and collage as I strive to intertwine figures and environment. I am excited by the acts of concealment, excavation, and revelation inherent in these processes.

ABOUT FRONTIER

For the Frontier Together Apart Online Residency, Susanna Crum, Luis Sahagun and I collaborated on a video – performance work that references the boundaries that are created and breached when we use Zoom. By working with the virtual background function we created windows into one another’s spaces, and by exploiting glitches with the way the camera reads the background, tried to make it appear that we were in the same space. The work culminated with Luis’s live performance where his body merged with the landscape and as he danced through his space, portals were created into Susanna’s and my spaces. At the same time Susanna and I harnessed the Zoom echo effect to create a live soundtrack for the performance. This was an attempt to amplify the disorientation that can occur when using Zoom as a way to think about frontiers in personal space, home life, body, and virtual spaces.