Art Statement
Originally from El Salvador, my body of work is an intuitive construction of memory as a form of personal myth-making that casts political expressions, voices modes of resistance, and speaks to a process of recovery.
I address issues of historical trauma, memory, hybrid identity and ancestry within a diasporic context. My initial formation as an artist began in printmaking, specializing in lithography and relief printing techniques, and over the years I've developed a multi-disciplinary practice on paper focused on convergence and expansion. As a result, this process has evolved into mixed media projects on paper that integrates drawing, painting, printmaking, collage work and stop motion animation video. Other extentions to my drawing practice include large scale wall drawings on site and installation work.
Central to my practice is the translation of intergenerational memory and impact of the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s into visual language. Growing up within a Salvadoran immigrant family shaped by civil war, I witnessed firsthand how violence reverberates through time -not as distant history, but as living presence that inhabits our memory and is encoded in the body. Coincidently, my research methodology pursues historical revision of inter-generational knowledge rooted in individual stories, collective histories, indigenous ancestry, socio-political topics of migration and post-war violence filtered through the possibilities of personal narration. My body of work brings a multitude of imagery found in pre-Hispanic mythology, Salvadoran popular folklore, Catholic iconographies with styles from Western art history, contemporary drawing to merge a hybridized aesthetic of historical, cultural and personal experience.
As a Salvadoran, and Latin American artist, my work thematizes a process of healing, regeneration and decolonization using plant imagery, local indigenous storytelling and reimagined ancient mythologies. Areas of interest and study complementary to my research activities and practice include contemporary Latin American Art and history, art and social movements, contemporary art and culture, folklorism, and American Indigenous knowledge systems.
As a Salvadoran visual artist and educator I’ve lived and worked in the ancestral unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, known as Vancouver for 12 years.
For online orders or purchases of original prints of my work please visit InPrint or: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/orcasd/
For further inquiries please contact me at: oscastillo78@gmail.com