Mariana Castillo Deball: Finding Oneself Outside

Mariana Castillo Deball: Finding Oneself Outside
January 22–April 14, 2019
South Galleries

Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975, Mexico City, Mexico) examines how knowledge and cultural heritage are produced, organized, measured, and authenticated. Her works often take inspiration from Mesoamerican iconography and narratives, considering their early colonial transformations and their presence in Central America today. Informed by her interest in time and space as well as cosmology and depictions of natural order, Castillo Deball’s works reflect unusual cross-sections of the world that reveal what Surrealist writer Roger Caillois called “neglected correlations” and “tissues of thought.” The exhibition will feature recent sculptures and an ongoing series of perforated books; its centerpiece, a specially commissioned inlaid wood floor installation, draws from an early colonial map of San Pedro Teozacoalco, Mexico, which blends the styles of European maps and sixteenth-century Mixtec codices. Within a show whose title alludes to a sensation central to both the study of history and the experience of encountering an unfamiliar culture, Castillo Deball’s works speak to the place of the viewer, the permeability of surfaces, and ideas of reciprocity and exchange.

This exhibition is curated by Natalie Bell, Associate Curator.