* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Andrea Castillo was born in Los Angeles, CA and earned a BA in Studio Art from Humboldt State University and is an MFA candidate at Lesley University College of Art and Design.
Andrea describes the work by saying, “I depict fabricated scenes and false memories of suburbia through painting. The invented scenes are from a archetypal mixture of past and present cultural impacts. I create a hybrid of these images to fictionalize a narrative of specific cultural signifiers. The idiosyncratic scenes of familiar elements of suburban life portray a symbolic and stylistic nostalgic ordinariness. My paintings refer to standardized images of the American family and examine our ideals of family cultural structures. Reconstructing anonymous memories from fragmented photographs culled from estate sales, antique thrift stores, and the Internet. By fusing unknown photographs into images, I am relating them to the process the mind uses to reconstruct actual past experiences. I am interested in how snapshots reconstruct a past that never was and how this past can be reshaped over and over again. My paintings recall an idealized domesticity and create new memories.”