June 2021: Diane Appaix Castro - Week 1
Diane Appaix Castro (she/her, @diappaix_art) is a 27 year old French and Spanish sculptor and installation artist who was born in Paris, France and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts from age four. Her work is strongly informed by her experience as an immigrant living at the intersection of three different cultures. Her works deal with the concepts of existence, humanity, presence - finding new ways to declare how we are in the world and leaving the door for possibilities elsewhere.
For the first week of the residency, I’d like to share a few snippets of projects I’ve been working on and explain a bit about my process.
The first of these is a projection project which aims to override the senses of hearing and vision in an attempt to render them insufficient at deciphering information. For this, I am using an audio-visualizer to convert an audio made of many recordings from the last 5 years into a visual experience where the participant must wear a large sphere over their head. The visuals are then projected onto it and the participant sees this from inside the sphere in a way which takes over their periphery. This project is partially inspired by James Turrell and the Ganzfeld psychology experiment.
This project is far from being completed; there is a lot I need to learn still about this process and it’s presenting many challenges but this battle with my art is how I prefer to work. I like that I’m not the only one making decisions, the work is also contributing back, demanding more time or effort on my part. A professor recently told me that since my work requires the participant to submit to it, it is only fair that I also do, because otherwise it would be cruel.
These sorts of challenging projects, however, always leave me needing something more concrete to do and this normally means making furniture or other similar things for my home. This week I made a frame for a couch and a day bed. This was an opportunity for me to make something functional and learn more about welding, something that I’m very new to.
The images and video are of a test I ran this week of the projection project, and some shots of the welded frames.
