Mariana Castillo Deball is one of three artists commissioned to create an artwork for the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor. 

⁠To connect the new building to the history of its site, Castillo Deball is creating Feathered Changes, a 75,000 square-metre site specific work, that will spread over the new building's hardscape in an expansive meditation on time, geologic history, and the museum’s site. LACMA sits on land that was a nourishing marshy ecosystem for thousands of years. The location produced a trove of fossils discovered during site preparation. With Feathered Changes, Castillo Deball acknowledges the many Indigenous people of the Los Angeles area and their connections to the larger Indigenous histories on our continent. 

A series of islands scattered across the east campus will be surrounded by a brushed pattern inscribed into the plaza with a method closely related to both the way concrete is textured before it is set with a broom or rake, and the techniques used in dry Zen gardens to create patterns in sand, reflecting possible circulation routes throughout the plaza and the organic shape of the building. The concrete islands are imprinted with fragments of the artist's feathered serpent drawings, based on fragments of ancient murals from Teotihuacán. The Feathered Serpent is an old Mesoamerican symbol representing the connection between the earth and the sun, soil and water, place and transformation. The installation will also be inscribed with animal tracks native to California, creating an organic drawing on the surface of the huge ground plane.

Castillo Deball has also been commissioned by LA Metro to create Four Pleated Landscapes: Fossil Ground, Woven Cienega, Medicinal Flora, and Urban Desert Fauna for the Wilshire/La Cienega Station on the D Line Extension. 

This project was inspired by the numerous fossils unearthed during the excavation of tunnels under Wilshire Boulevard. Based on a technique archaeologists use to record fossil finds without removing them from their environment, Castillo Deball created fossil casts of selected samples from the site and incorporated images inspired by the casts into the design of her work. 

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