Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return

On view in ICA LA’s Project Room is the first institutional solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Los Angeles-based artist Jackie Castillo. Embracing the mediums of film photography, sculpture, and installation, Castillo’s work is marked by an ongoing investigation into the relationship between city infrastructure, collective memory, and the isolation and anxiety felt by working class immigrants.

Raised in Santa Ana, California to parents who immigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, Castillo’s site-specific installations combine photographs of suburban landscapes with architectural remnants to explore the ways in which place, labor, memories, and identity can become fractured, estranged, or made invisible. Often printed on, or adhered to, materials such as reclaimed tiles, bricks, and cement pavers, Castillo’s photographs of rose gardens, fenced lawns, and domestic facades are only visible in parts—mirroring the violent shifts of a city plagued by increasing displacement and gentrification. At once the scaffold and the debris, the repair and the ruin, Castillo’s works maintain a sense of impermanence and instability reflective of the historical and material changes in the built environment and the precarious and often invisible labor responsible for its making, unmaking, and rebuilding.

For her solo presentation at ICA LA, Castillo is developing a new and ambitious installation experimenting with scale and sculptural material. Featuring discarded rooftop shingles, Castillo’s work calls attention to the disparity between the lives of those who build the roof and those who live in the comfort of its shelter. Created in close collaboration with her father, this project also expands upon Castillo’s enduring interest in preserving forms of shared cultural, architectural, and familial knowledge, even amidst ongoing erasure.

Dates: April 5 - August 31, 2025.