Castro remembers waking up the morning of the 8th to a black cloud hovering over Los Angeles. At 7:32am he texted his cousin with a photo of his front street: “Dude, this is apocalyptic scary. Where are you?” His cousin, who has a home in Piñon Hills, sent back a picture of the view: a pristine mountain top with a snow cap. “Ok, You sold me, I’m coming,” Rick replied. He hit the road by 8:30am, navigating a circuitous route around the fires. “LA is beyond gigantic,” he says. “To put it into perspective, the Palisades Fire is larger than Manhattan.”
Castro returned to his family’s cabin, not far from the Devil’s Punchbowl Natural Center, a “geological wonder” in the Angeles National Forest, which had been 95% destroyed during the Bobcat Fire. The charred, desecrated landscape became the inspiration for an apocalyptic vision of love, survival, and desire in a desolate realm that he made at the end of 2020, and later continued after securing his first grant in 2021.
Castro will be showing selections from the series in Braver New World, opening February 7 at the CDMX Art Festival in Mexico City. The exhibition, which takes its title from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel, features 16 works made between 1989–2022 that “depict the state of the State and things to come,” Castro says.
“The images are visual experiences of my life, the highs and lows from innocence to fear, beauty, lust, betrayal, and death,” he continues. “It’s apropos and ironic that the photos I shot of the fires at the end of 2020 are now a reality. They are more relevant than when I shot them, but it’s the same idea of global warming and how things can change in an instant.”
