Current recipient of Franklin Furnace Award 2019. IV Castellanos: IV Castellanos (one/ones, they/them) is a Brooklyn based abstract performance artist, curator, and sculptor. Castellanos has performed at the Queens Museum (New York), Railyard (Santa Fe), dfbrl8r (Chicago), Gruentaler9 (Berlin), and Grace Exhibition Space (Brooklyn) to name a few. One has served as a core contributor to the Brooklyn performance art community, on the Artists of Color Council for Movement Research and have sat on the Brooklyn International Performance Art, Movement Research and Exponential Festival curatorial committee. One has an ongoing collaboration with Amanda Hunt and the Feminist Art Group. Current recipient of Franklin Furnace Award 2019.
Artist collaborative Statement:. By wrestling, laboring together, engaging with sculptural objects built to degrade, and organizing materials alongside one another's bodies, we resist corporeal vulnerabilities and reclaim our power/agency through performing of objectifications of our own design. In this way we look at the treatment of our self-objectification and otherness within everyday private and performative public spaces, creating distances between the maker/self as a mechanism of survival/resistance/self-preservation. We examine our daily embodied relationships with objects and materials. Working with raw building materials, mould making, welding, re-purposing and transforming found objects through whittling and manipulating we find the objects that can live as stand alone or become performative as our collaborators. It is important to us to source and build our own materials because we value the histories of our craft, rendering the entire process of production as performance.