LACMA

makeovers, particularly the men presented flaunting the artfully styled tresses and curls of eighteenth-century aristo- crats. The obsessive detailing in the hair showcases Castaño's flamboyant, calligraphic gestures and her graceful skill with watercolor. The Hair Boys are depicted in a variety of unex- pected colors, including yellow, blue, green, and violet. The exquisitely detailed coiffures are created with thin, repetitive strokes and applied with a brush no thicker than a lip liner. Recognizing how the artist's use of watercolor is achieved by using a technique related to cosmetic application highlights the artist's play with gendered conventions of representation. The Hair Boys are based on photographs of Castaño's male friends, and these source images alluringly share certain stylistic conventions with the mode in which men commonly present themselves on social networking websites. Like pictures displayed on MySpace, Friendster, or Facebook, Castaño's images are based on digital close-up portraits that are calcu- latedly casual but flattering. This affected casualness func- tions in contrast to the popular styles of portrait photography associated with such studios as Olan Mills or Glamour Shots, present in shopping malls across the country. Castaño's Hair Boys series merges aspects of these two dissimilar conventions of portrait photography—one vernacular, the other overtly commercial, to elucidate an overall interest in "prettification" and whimsically challenge fixed notions of gender. —C. ONDINE CHAVOYA Covered with decoration and loaded with accessories, the art of Carolyn Castaño literally glitters. Her work offers the viewer an elaborate, dramatic scenography of spangled glamour, bejeweled excess, and embellished artifice. Castaño's ongoing series of collage-drawings, such as Gentleman Narcissus (2004), are meticulously constructed from images cut out from magazines. Largely culled from high-fashion editorial spreads and advertisements, the pilfered images are rearranged and layered with an extravagant assortment of shimmering materials: baubles, feathers, beads, even false eyelashes and artificial fingernails. Flourishes of watercolor and sumi ink interlace the collaged figures and objects with similarly embellished visual patterns. Additional figurative elements are drawn into the sinuous compositions, such as butterflies, peacocks, flowers, bulls, and high-heeled shoes. Castaño's extravagant mixture of imagery and materials at times approaches abstraction, but her beautifully executed drawings retain their figurative grounding. Castaño's work revels in sensual pleasure and material substance while also examining notions of looking and desire. Amid this profusion of visual splendor and dazzling dynamism, something slightly sinister can be found in the work's implicit correlation between adornment and fetishism. These provocative images explore the connections between seduction and appearance, desire and marketing, the spectacle and artifice, but not by dismissing them altogether. When she works in larger-scale formats, such as canvas or wall installations, Castaño's interest in patterning is further drawn out while still utilizing a variety of media, including rhinestones, glitter, feathers, and mirrors. Her use of bold, colorful geometric patterning as a formal and decorative background for portraits invokes 1960s-style design, particularly the work of Verner Panton, the influential Danish furniture and interior designer known for his vibrant colors and playful shapes. Many of Castaño's highly stylized acrylic paintings of canvas function as oblique self-portraits and feature the artist's alter ego, "Betty Ramirez," a character modeled after the stars of Mexican Golden Age cinema and Italian neorealism. In her recent series Hair Boys (2004), a multicultural assortment of young men are titivated with elaborately rendered (and sometimes decidedly retro) hairstyles. While a number of the Hair Boys may resemble fairly straightforward portraits of young men pictured with tender gazes, several appear to function more like fantasy 128 CAROLYN CASTAÑO

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