bio - Alexandra Castelli

BIOGRAPHY

Water is the universal medium that makes up our bodies and our environment, we all know that. We “swim” through emotional and psychological tides, our bodies interacting and exchanging with the currents and energies around us. How this affects the integrity of our inner selves is the very theme of these works: how does my experience of the world, my very existence in it, affect and define who I am?

The idea of painting people under water came to me over 25 years ago: my mother had given me one of those high definition cameras with 14 gazillion pixels! I began photographing my own kids in the pool, like any mom. My youngest, however, categorically refused to be photographed (Amish? Masai?) Every time I pressed the shutter (and those things had a l-o-n-g delay back then) my son would dive underwater. I persisted. He kept diving.

At the end of the day I dumped the whole lot into my laptop. I scanned hundreds of blurred photos of splashes and pool floors, searching for a single image of my young son. Because of the high definition, I was able to enlarge ad infinitum, and that is when I began to see my underwater images. They were distorted, abstracted and beautiful. The body perimeter deeply affected by watery environment, and light often drawing abstract patterns on the skin surface. I endeavor to describe my life journey in paint.

In recent works the “change” induced by experience/environment has become part of the body’s own identity, no longer so much defined by outside forces. Distortions of form, light and color once induced by the exterior world now describe a deeper, inner reality, INSIDE the body, integral to who we are. Our bodies are now containers of experience, still navigating, still exploring, still swimming…