Pain is Universal but so is Hope (White)
Maker
Castillo, Liset
Cuban, b. 1974
Date2007
MediumChromogenic development print
Dimensionsoverall: 40 in x 50 in
Credit LineMuseum purchase
Object number2008:111
About the ArtistThrough intricate sand castles, Liset Castillo builds a utopian microcosm where different world civilizations converge and ultimately collapse. Playing with architectural monuments such as the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Great Wall of China, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York, Rio’s monumental Christ the Redeemer, and the Empire State Building, her timeless city is both grand and unrealizable. Using projections, drawings, her hands, and a trowel, among other tools, Castillo builds, photographs, destroys, and re-photographs sand sculptures in her backyard Brooklyn studio. The resulting images convey dilapidated cities surrounded by rubble and craggy terrain, implying that history inevitably collapses in on itself. Castillo is a graduate of the Institute Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba (1998). She lives and works in Amsterdam and Brooklyn.![Florence hid her pain from us, but she liked her oncologist Dr. Adi Gidron and described the precise location of all her pains to him. He called her “the best patient I ever had,” and became a sad friend to both of us, having exhausted all the medical treatments Florence was capable of surviving. We had a false flash of hope after she began responding positively to chemo therapy, but it didn’t last. She had 4th stage cancer, the very worst. [...]](/internal/media/dispatcher/4580/thumbnail)
