We are proud to announce 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.
About Feathered Changes
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 her work, 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 Teotihuacan. 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.
+ about mariana castillo deball
+ read the full article in los angeles times