Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball is a Mexican visual artist currently based in Berlin. She works primarily in installation, sculpture, photography and drawing.

Castillo Deball uses installation, sculpture, photography, and drawing to explore the role objects play in our understanding of identity and history. Engaging in prolonged periods of research and field work, she takes on the role of the explorer or the archaeologist, compiling found materials in a way that reveals new connections and meanings. In her 2013 work Stelae Storage, plaster casts copied from monolithic Mayan stone sculptures called stelae are displayed on metal racks similar to those found in a museum's storage area. In a similar work, Lost Magic Kingdoms Paolozzi (2013), Castillo Deball culled photographic reproductions from the personal archives of late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who mixed pop and ethnographic references. The works presented in her 2019 solo exhibition Replaying Life's Tape at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, derive from the Ediacaran fossils from the Ediacara Hills, South Australia. Incorporating methods of scientific display systems into her prints and installations, Castillo Deball considers the contested relationship between time, site, and history.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023