Unmaking the City
Installation view, Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, April 5–August 31, 2025. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.
Jackie Castillo’s Through the Descent, Like the Return, on view at ICA LA, converts the gallery space into an active demolition site. The show centers various floor- and roof-mounted sculptures of steel bars and Spanish barrel tiles, arranged serially in diagonal formations to create the illusion of downward descent. This cascade of terracotta suggests deconstruction rather than the building up of a new structure. Composed with intentional precariousness, Castillo’s works fragment Los Angeles’s vernacular architecture to unpack how race- and class-based inequalities configure urban space.
Castillo harvests used rooftop shingles to create her sculptures. Opting for recycled materials, she shows her artistic practice’s roots in the streets of the city, resisting the confinement of her creative process to white-walled studios and museums. Constructing art that draws both visually and materially from the public sphere, Castillo visualizes LA as ever-changing rather than static. Through her display of destruction, Castillo shows that urban landscapes are not only created but also torn down and reconstructed again ad infinitum. In doing so, Castillo exposes the often-disregarded social and economic forces that make such a process possible.
Installation view, Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, April 5–August 31, 2025. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.
In particular, her work makes visible the unseen acts of labor that cohere a sprawling urban metropolis. Such construction is often undertaken by exploited immigrant workers, who make significant yet unacknowledged contributions to LA’s infrastructure. Although they play an essential role in the city’s continued development, immigrant communities are frequently criminalized in political and media discourse. A painful irony persists: humans are labelled illegal, but the unethical work conditions they face are not.
The Spanish barrel tile found across Castillo’s works is a particularly powerful metaphor for the underlying inequalities shaping LA’s urban fabric. The material’s origins lie in colonization and religious indoctrination given their introduction to California through mission architecture. In the twentieth century, the Spanish barrel tile returned again as a prominent design motif with the emergence of Spanish Colonial Revival homes, a now-ubiquitous style in the American Southwest that draws heavily from California’s missions.
Castillo’s sculptures thus navigate the ways in which the discipline of architecture has gotten tied up in histories of oppression and domination. Simulating the destruction of colonial architecture, Castillo finds a new language of space through the negation of its current flawed parameters. Her sculptures embrace impermanence—depicting a moment of transition between fixed states of built and unbuilt—to manifest a new social order free from inequality. Transience becomes the foundation for a new Los Angeles that addresses its violent scaffolding instead of covering it up.
Installation view, Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, April 5–August 31, 2025. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.
In many ways, Through the Descent, Like the Return feels like a parallel to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1970s sculptural pursuits, in which the artist would dramatically incise abandoned New York City buildings to create thought-provoking spatial voids. Describing his work as “anarchitecture,” meaning “against architecture,” Matta-Clark sought to destabilize conventional architectural systems and the cultural and economic frameworks informing them. Castillo takes up a similar task through her installations, albeit filtered by contemporary decolonial frameworks and contextualized to LA.
Alongside her cascading sculptures, Through the Descent, Like the Return features three wall-mounted works pictorializing written and photographic content documenting LA’s urban landscape. Two works on the left and right walls of the gallery feature images of LA housing and construction sites, printed on cement board. At the show’s back wall, immediately visible to the viewer upon entrance, is a concrete slab etched with text from the artist and placed in a welded steel frame. Once again, the artist opts for industrial construction supplies rather than rarified art materials in producing the show’s 2D works. Despite the flatness of these compositions, they read as sculptures rather than paintings.
The inscribed concrete slab, bearing writing about the artist’s experiences informing the terracotta sculptures, feels as if it has been extracted directly from the sidewalk. Describing the visual and aural experience of demolition, and in particular the shattering of ceramic tiles, the panel brings viewers into a sensory experience of the city.
Installation view, Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, April 5–August 31, 2025. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.
Similarly, the photographs on cement board announce their construction to the viewer with industrial text clarifying the material. Printed during manufacturing, this text makes the conditions of the works’ making central to the viewing experience. Castillo’s atmospheric photographs cannot be separated from the process of their assembly.
Ultimately, Through the Descent, Like the Return’s exploration of urban destruction and renewal has a lot to offer LA given its current state of healing. Still reeling from the Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires, many individuals in the city are reckoning with what it means to rebuild. Castillo’s works offer a blueprint for responsible reconstruction, highlighting significant gaps in the production and consumption of urban architecture that ought not be ignored. As ceramic shingles descend and a new conception of space comes to life, may architecture undermine, rather than reaffirm, unjust social hierarchies.
Installation view, Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, April 5–August 31, 2025. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA.
Jackie Castillo: Through the Descent, Like the Return is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from April 5 through August 31, 2025.
Edited by Jubilee Park
