Last Chance: Art Inspired by the Drug Wars

Solano Canyon-based painter and video artist Carolyn Castano has been at the cutting edge for a long while.

Her work was included in the controversial Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, which originated at LACMA in 2008.

She's been a board member at Highland Park's Outpost for Contemporary Art, and, in 2010, organized a Soccer Tournament benefit integrating performance art and live music on the Vista Hermosa fields in Echo Park.

Castano's parents came to the U.S. from Colombia in 1962, and settled in Historic Filipinotown, where she grew up.

Lately, she's been thinking and creating a lot about narco-traffcking and how women, especially, are affected. 

Her show El Jardin Femenil Y Otros Ocasos features paintings and videos on that theme, according to a press release:

The role of women in the male-dominated drug culture is performed in many guises as mules, money launderers, trophies and wives.  Not coincidentally, many of these women are also beauty queens, models, actresses, or TV journalists.  The show includes large format paintings of young female victims.

Castano also portrays a newscaster modelled after Maria Elena Salinas, a well-known Latina journalist, in a video created for the show.

El Jardin Femenil Y Otros Ocasos continues Saturday, April 7 at the Walter Macial Gallery 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd 90034.

Click here for more information.