︎

Ruben Bryan Castillo



About/CV
Instagram
One Week in Spring (2021)

One Week Before Spring
Having a Flower With You
One Week in Spring
Prints, Drawings, Sculptures (2018-2020)

Fluff (2018)
For One, In A Shared Room
(2017)

Our Pillows
Pillow Talk
Drawing Of Our Closet (Love Notes)
Can Dishwashing Be Queer?
Things I Want From IKEA
(2014-2018)

Make Room For Comfortable
Pink Couch Fantasy
Shopping List 
Domestic Views
(2012-2016)

Drawings
Prints
Sculpture
Pictures In Our Home
Body Vernacular (2012)

©Ruben Bryan Castillo 2021
Ruben Castillo
The phrase “one week in spring” was a signifier of a specific coincidence from 2018. While looking back at my archive of photographs documenting mine and my partner’s disheveled bed in the morning, I noticed a consistent set of photographs spanning one full week at the onset of the spring solstice. I was drawn to this idea of change and growth associated with the season. My practice slowly began to shift during this time to be about learning and a patient production, focusing on the space and context of gathering, of quiet, of intimacy. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic however, the simultaneity of stillness and transformation occurring in everyday life brought a natural disruption to established routines. This new work was produced under my own tense framework of urgency that avoided overthinking—these prints are purely about play and curiosity. This imagery draws upon nature and the biological systems modeling change, the concept of emergence, and the added coincidence that the start of the 2020 pandemic lockdown also happened before a spring solstice. I continue my investigations on intimacy, but here I look more at grander gestures and arrangements as a means of navigating and discovering possibilities.




Having A Cloud With You, 2021, etchings on paper, 16" x 22" In the Flowers, 2021, lithograph with etchings on paper, 16" x 22" Through & Through, 2021, lithograph with etchings on paper, 16" x 22" The Middle (Your Cloud, My Cloud), 2021, lithograph with etchings on paper, 16" x 22" A Study on Boundless Reciprocity (Our Clouds, Had), 2021, lithograph with etchings on paper, 16" x 22" It's the "Having With You," For Me, 2021, lithograph with etchings on paper, 16" x 22" "In the Blue (With You)", 2021, lithograph with etching on paper, 16" x 22" A Study on Morandi & Stillness, 2021, lithograph with etchings on paper, 16" x 22" Glowing, 2021, lithograph and etching with relief-roll on paper, 16" x 22" Flow With It, 2021, lithograph with etchings and photopolymer gravure on paper, 16" x 22"