Care Package Questions for Andrew Castaneda (by BC)

Care Package Questions for Andrew Castaneda

1-     I see both your recent ceramic work and your future Breakaway work as a type of amalgam or mixture.  Using Greg Lynn’s description of mixing as a guide (in the below text), I would be curious to know if the formal aspects of your work match beating, whisking or whipping?

2-     Many stylistic merges can be made when one mashes an appropriated memory with appropriated objects or iconography.  Does the construction of merging conceptual differences (different places, different times, different references) sync with a formal corollary in your future photographs?  For example, when you imagine making these photographs or advertisements, will their elements fuse disparities and produce a seamless image? Or will their disparities be cued to the viewer to be more assembled or chopped? In other words: do you want us to know these photos are a deconstructed and then reconstructed image?

3-     When combining parts in your recent ceramic work, how do the verbs of their proximity  inform the nouns of your content? You can also think of this question in reverse order: how do the nouns of your content inform the verbs of their proximity. 

4-     Why is the flat back so important to the recent ceramic work? Is it based on convenience or do you want the flatness to refer to a “home base” or a type of ground zero ( where agitation starts of ends)?  Is the flat back akin to the cartoon black hole that Bugs Bunny drops down into? If the plywood is more than mere convenience- I think you could do more to it before adding mass on top. Perhaps washing it with fabric dye or brushing tool dip on the side that faces the wall (or whatever).  If it is only used for structural convenience, then I think it would benefit to change its’ back side topology. In short, I think the formal qualities of the plywood should meld into your objects story more. That is not a question- sorry.

“If there is a single effect produced in architecture by folding, it will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within a new continuous mixture. Culinary theory has developed both a practical and precise definition for at least three types of mix­tures. The first involves the manipulation of homogeneous elements; beating, whisking and whipping change the volume but not the nature of a liquid through agitation. The second method of incorporation mixes two or more disparate elements; chopping, dicing, grinding, grating, slicing, shredding and mincing eviscerate elements into fragments. The first method agitates a single uniform ingredient, the second eviscerates disparate ingredients. Folding, creaming and blending mix smoothly multiple ingredients 'through repeated gentle overturnings without stirring or beating' in such a way that their individual characteristics are maintained.6 For instance, an egg and chocolate are folded together so that each is a distinct layer within a continuous mixture.

Folding employs neither agitation nor evisceration but a supple layering. Like­wise, folding in geology involves the sedimentation of mineral elements or deposits which become slowly bent and compacted into plateaus of strata. These strata are compressed, by external forces, into more or less continuous layers within which heterogeneous deposits are still intact in varying degrees of intensity.” From Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, The Pliant and The Supple, by Greg Lynn  (page 23. 24)