Callyann Casteel
Blind, bound, impotent monsters; fat hamburgers; and headless debutantes donning flesh-colored pelts: these are a few of the characters that populate Callyann Casteel’s riotous drawings, performances, and handmade soft sculpture. In Casteel’s highly imaginative world, bodies (part human, part animal, and part food group) wear the half-digested glut of popular and consumer culture like so many winter coats piled onto a runway model. Ridiculous, gangly, and pathetic, Casteel’s aberrant cast of characters embodies a humorous approach to individual failure and issues of global concern, such as food safety, bioethics, pollution, and environmental crisis.
Backwater Nasty One and Backwater Nasty Two (2005) are among Casteel’s most involved projects to date. Heeding Claes Oldenburg’s famed proclamation against art that just sits around on its ass, these elaborate, overstuffed, Day-Glo-colored costumes are designed to be worn in spontaneous, unscripted performances that Casteel enacts with friends and fellow artists. Casteel began these performances in 2002, with a series of hamburger and calculator costumes worn to grocery stores and while giving away free hamburgers in a park. Since then, Casteel’s costumes have become more intricate and less direct in their allusions, with works such as the Nasties offering up a strange brew of Cabbage Patch cuddliness and postpunk aesthetics matched with the surreal excesses of camp and schlock horror films.
Never didactic, Casteel’s costumes often sheath their content in a soft, stuffed outer layer. Increasingly, though, Casteel’s work seems to be adopting the double-sided mask of the carnivalesque, wherein critique and celebration are fused. An abject mass of melting ooze, Casteel’s Dead Blob (2005), for example, could make its debut on the stage of a children’s theater. Yet with eyes taped over and mouth agape, it may also be the (im)perfect mascot for our times.
—Stacy Switzer
