Continuing our Year of Innovation programming virtually, PAC LA presents an inside look at the development of Rupture (the Distance) with photographer and visual artist Jackie Castillo. This online lecture, hosted by curator Hannah Sloan, offers an intriguing preview of an evolving body of work created for a forthcoming public presentation in early 2027.
Tracing the project from its earliest conceptual questions while situating it within the continuity of her broader practice, Castillo asks what material or photographic process can embody acondition rather than merely depict it. Beginning with the intertwinedconditions of distance, anticipation, latency, class, and rupture as they emerge within the Southern California built environment, the work explores how photography might move beyond the image to become sculptural, architectural,and spatial. It also considers how the photograph may expand beyond a means of representation to become a way of constructing experience itself.
Jackie Castillo (b. Orange, California 1990) is a Los-Angeles based artist whose practice moves between photography, sculpture, and installation to examine how the built environment shapes lived experience, particularly for those whose labor sustains it but whose presence often goes unrecognized. Working with film photographs of suburban and urban landscapes alongside materials drawn from those same sites, Castillo allows fragments of place to reappear in altered forms in her work. These elements are rarely presented as whole, instead, they remain partial, interrupted, and rearranged, reflecting how spaces that appear stable and familiar can produce quiet forms of dislocation, tension, and estrangement. In this way, the work attends to what persists beneath the surface: histories, gestures, and forms of labor that shape the landscape but are not fully seen.
Her work resides in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art permanent collection, she received the 2025 Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture, and the 2025 LA County Department of Arts and Culture Public Art Apprenticeship. Her solo exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2025) and As-Is Gallery (2021, 2023).