DaWire

Myritza Castillo works within a very precise and calculated set-stage offering an often disjointed narrative that straddles the theatrical with the performative. Working mostly with photography and video, Castillo constructs and seemingly deconstructs narrative sequences that through pictorial motifs display very specific moments in time.

The theatricality of her photographic work is perhaps best exemplified in an image from the series The Impossible Replication of the Last Note; an impeccably dressed musician on stage looking towards an empty theater. The medium of photography lends itself to the fragmentation of this narrative and its multiple interpretations, as it offers a moment frozen in time lacking a reference to the event preceding or following the image. Yet her images, often worked in series, display a very documentary quality that gives the viewer the illusion of a linear and sequential story line.

In other works such as the video Under Construction and the piece Little Stories of Collective Sub Dreams, the narrative is taken further into the performative. In Under Construction, the artist carefully and intentionally destroys a painting to construct an installation. In it, a hooded Castillo hits, rips and shreds one of her paintings until finally placing it on a plexiglass urn for showing. The painting’s imminent death is the performative act that produces the final work.

In the interactive piece Little Stories of Collective Sub Dreams the viewer/participator is the main subject and producer of the work. It is comprised of a typewriter and a rolling sheet of paper, in which the artist starts off typing the lines of a story and the viewer is expected to continue writing it; a postmodern variation on the Surrealist exquisite corpse that also brings into question our capability to tell a story, as information is increasingly readily digested for our consumption and instant gratification.

-Carla Acevedo

Myritza Castillo holds an MFA in Theory and Practice on Contemporary Art (video and photography) from the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has shown her work in numerous local and international institutions. She lives and works between Boston and Puerto Rico.

Images provided by the artist