My video work adopts an abstract approach that is concerned with surface, duration, focus, and rhythm. It has a visually compulsive, fluid, immersive quality, evident as the work gradually unfolds. Inhabiting a physical and psychological space, the work enables the viewer to project their own memories and experiences onto the moving images.
Currently, I am investigating the ‘fate’ of the digital moving image once various of its original characteristics such as colour and form are stripped away, so that what remains are the central elements of the image where the pixels are degraded, and the image is no longer identifiable
My work is informed by a deep interest in the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, the paintings of the early Abstract Expressionists, the Surrealists, and of Structuralist film makers such as Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, Paul Sharit.
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Rosalind Davis writes:
Jackie Castellano’s work is mesmerizing. Compelling, eerie, mysterious and intense, her videos require the viewer to concentrate. One has to really look as the work slowly unravels, subtly changing, in such a way that you are unsure if it is really changing at all until you reach a point where there is no doubt that the entire surface has shifted. Within that strange ambiguous landscape, there is subtle movement, the darkness is deeply sensual, painterly, yet painful; reminiscent of Goya’s terrors. Her work inhabits physical and psychological space and the viewer is drawn into projecting their memories both conscious and unconscious onto her work. We recognise ourselves in that strange unexpected landscape, we wait to emerge.
The beauty of this work is that despite its sophisticated exterior that one could almost dismiss at first glance as clever software, it is actually made of the most simplistic things; glass, light, surface, reflections, truth.
27th November 2012