Carlos Castro Arias: Vandalismo Artesanal

Colombian artist Carlos Castro Arias's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles explores perspectival histories of the conquest of the Americas through the use of opposing craft traditions: bronze casting—a European technique long associated with monuments to colonial power—set against weaving with natural fibers, beads, and ancestral materials that carry the knowledge of Indigenous peoples and belief systems. By collapsing these opposing traditions into a single object, Castro Arias refutes both the colonial monument and its simple inversion. His work holds the tension between these histories rather than favoring one over another, thus opening space for a third position: a shared, ongoing act of making sense of what happened and how that legacy still touches contemporary culture.