Artists
United States of America
Elizabeth Castaldo
Flowering Bodies
06.02.23 01.03.23
Elizabeth Castaldo is a New York based artist, printmaker, and bookbinder. She has completed residencies at Arquetopia in Oaxaca Mexico, the Center for Book Arts, NYC and Printmaker’s Open Forum, Oxford PA. 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. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including with the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Center for Book Arts, Saint Joseph’s College, Oklahoma City University, Landing Contemporary, Empty Set Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She teaches printmaking and book arts at Parsons School of Design and the Center for Book Arts. Her work is held in many private and institutional collections including SCAD, The University of Alberta, Carnegie Melon University, Yale University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work addresses the idea of the divine feminine as a creative power and force of connection. I seek to open the potential of what the divine feminine can be within myself as I struggle to assert my autonomy as a woman and mother living within a patriarchal society. Through my mixed media and collage works, I search for beauty, joy, comfort and acceptance in the feminine body. I consider what it feels like to be in a female body, the boundaries of my body against other bodies and my surroundings. As part of my practice I am attempting to reclaim sensuality and sexuality as a mother. I see the struggles of womxn as intertwined with the struggle to end extractive and destructive practices that harm the earth and all living things. I am seeking ways to center healing from these harms and explore the desire to nurture the self and others as a source of power. My work is process driven and generative. I enjoy pushing pattern and layering to the limits, creating multi-layered and visually abundant works on paper. I commune with the work through the meditative process of hand cutting intricate paper collage pieces, drawing repetitive patterns by hand, creating hand pulled prints and watercolor washes and layering them together as I strive to intertwine figures and environment.
BIO
Elizabeth Castaldo
1984 | New York, USA
Lives and works in New York
EDUCATION
2013 | MFA, Printmaking, Dean’s Fellowship, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA, USA
2007 | BFA, Painting, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, USA
EXHIBITIONS
2022 | Patterns of Power. Empty Set Gallery, Bronx, USA
2021 | Revolution, Resistance, and Activism. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
2021 | (S)mother. Bethany Arts Center, Ossining, USA
2020 | Proximate Magic. Board Room Gallery, O’Connor Hall, Saint Joseph’s College, Patchogue, USA
2020 | Freed Formats: The Book Reconsidered, Traveling Exhibiton. Ridgefield Guild of Artists, Putnam Arts Council, Creative Arts Workshop. Five Points Gallery, Torrington, USA
RESIDENCIES
2022 | Arquetopia Foundation, Oaxaca, Mexico
2021 | Together Apart: Frontier, Online Residency with Proyecto´ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2020 | Kolaj Institute Art Meets History Artist Lab, Online Residency with Kolaj Magazine, New Orleans USA
2019 | Printmakers Open Forum All Media Residency, Printmakers Open Forum, Oxford PA, USA
2017 | Scholarship for Advanced Studies in Book Arts, Center for Book Arts, New York, NY, USA
AWARDS
2017 | SGCI Emerging Professional Grant Recipient
2013 | First Place Purchase Award, ACA Library 6th Annual Student Artists’ Book Competition, ACA Library of SCAD, Atlanta, GA, USA (Juror: Margot Ecke, Artist and Designer)
2012 | Best In Show, Sidewalk Art Project, Atlanta Preservation Center, Atlanta, GA, USA
2011 | Second Place, Illuminations Juried Exhibition, Center Arts Gallery, Newburgh, NY, USA (Jurors: Stuart Sachs, Virginia Walsh, Martha Zola, and Peter Cody)
Related Activities
´aceNITE
Stories
Artists in Dialogue
01.03.23
The second aceNITE of the year presented five women artists from different origins (Chile, Canada, Spain, the United States, Venezuela and England) intertwining cultures, identities and memories to tell stories, discover secrets and make visible forgotten circumstances through the projects carried out during their residences at ´ace, in the first slot of 2023.
The territory, its journey and personal experiences are present in the stories of Amy Stoker (USA) and Constanza Reyes (Chile). Stoker´s visual research constructs a narrative that reflects the struggle of generational unknowing and loss. With the help of a genealogist, the artist acquired records including censuses, land deeds, vintage and modern maps, and photographs to depict the family history that went missing over the years, seeking to build a narrative that reflects ignorance and generational loss. By other hand, Reyes uses as a starting point a kind of found object: a book bougth during her tours around Buenos Aires that narrates and describes the conquest of Peru. With the intention of appropriating the book, the artist adapts the story with the history of the conquest of Chile, and with contemporary Chilean conflicts, according to her own experience, making a printed intervention on it.
Ariana Pirela Sánchez (Venezuela-Spain-Canada), Elizabeth Castaldo (United States) and Sacha Beeley (England) highlight stories related to the female universe. Beeley, present a short film that explores the harsh life of a Queen Bee within the hive. The film metaphors with women invites you to think about mothers in all shapes and sizes and the invisible emotional labour they carry out. Elizabeth Castaldo addresses the idea of the divine in the feminine as a creative power and a force of connection with nature through an installation in the Diálogo space, which presents an installation overflowed of shapes and colors. Finally, Ariana Pirela Sánchez (with a melted culture that comes from her Venezuelan and Spanish origins mixed by years of residence in Canada) uses a legend of the Wayúu culture (as a metaphor to narrate the female transmission of teachings) to weave and unweave the threads of memory. She re-weaved the forgotten stories through a poetic installation made with raw wool, which she built and in where she developed her performance.
We also celebrated Marcela Caballeros´s installation finissage -after three months on display- in the Espacio Transversal.
Related artists
Exhibitions
Flowering Bodies
Elizabeth Castaldo
01.03.23 01.03.23
Flowering Bodies is the first site-specific graphic installation by Elizabeth Castaldo that was exhibited at the second edition of ‘ace Nite this year. During her residency at ‘ace, she was inspired by the plant life of Buenos Aires and created drawings of flowers and leaves, representing many local plant forms including hibiscus flowers, ceibo or coral tree, crown of thorns, jacaranda, purple heart, and monstera. These drawings were used to make photolithography plates from which many multiples were hand-printed, overlapping patterns and more detailed drawings.
These prints were cut to create a figure, as well as the shapes of flowers and monstera leaves, which were then used as modular elements to create a three-dimensional installation in the mezzanine space. Her work addresses the idea of the divine in the feminine as a creative power and force of connection, represented by the suspended figure, surrounded by a garden of floral forms and patterns printed in different layers on the paper.
