At the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), terra cotta tiles hang from the ceiling, floating almost angelically. They’re suspended by rebar, creating a serene staircase. For photographer and sculptor Jackie Castillo’s latest installation, “Through the Descent, Like the Return,” she collaborated with her father Roberto, an engineer who immigrated to the U.S. from Guadalajara in the 1980s. Their work is commentary on LA, immigrants, and working-class people.
The idea for the tiles was rooted in 2017, Castillo explains, when she was walking in her Mid-Wilshire neighborhood and heard “the piercing shattering of ceramics.” Laborers were re-roofing a home. “As they flung these shingles into the air, they twisted and turned, and sometimes they looked like birds transforming into something else. They inevitably landed in a dumpster parked in the driveway.”
While most people would walk by and see it as regular construction, Castillo views the world largely through an artistic lens. “What I pay the most attention to is the built environment, and how much more it reflects than just aesthetics. It really carries the weight of class, migration, aspiration, and how bodies are controlled, and our senses being surveilled, and really survival,” she explains.
In her exhibit, the sculptures and photos are stand-ins for working-class people, including undocumented immigrants, who create and maintain environments we live in, she says.
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.
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.
The story of immigrants relates to her own family, since her mom and dad met in the U.S. after immigrating here on a student visa and a traveler’s visa, respectively. They were both seeking opportunities for better lives. Her dad, who studied engineering in Guadalajara, worked in the service industry his entire life here in the United States.
“I wanted to take the opportunity in this exhibition to have this conversation with my family, for me to return home, right? Because they're in Orange County. I'm in LA. And I wanted to bring my practice as an artist home. So working with him, working with my sister, who studied landscape architecture, to envision this work and to really fabricate it, make it together, right? My father played such a big role in the engineering for how these roof tiles were going to hold up in these impossible, chaotic moments. We were able to create a type of order.”
Castillo’s sister made the 3D model of the exhibition space, plus every piece of rebar (that suspended the tiles in the air) and tile to the precise dimensions. “That allowed … my father and I to figure out how to place these sculptures in the space in a way that allows people's bodies to be activated, to really turn that space around and create a cyclical relationship between the viewer and the sculptures and the architecture.”
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.
The exhibition also speaks to the cyclical nature of construction and destruction. “The material of this work is the city of Los Angeles, but it's fragmented parts, right? These are fragments of the built environment, photographs framed of very specific views of the city that do speak to the cycles of destruction and renewal of our urban and suburban realities.”
She adds that the Spanish shingle embodies the weight of metaphor and history — people can’t look at the roof without thinking about the region’s colonial history, and understanding that it comes from Spain and the Middle East before that. “Human nature, this is our story, it's about migration, and the transferring of ideas and the moving of people.”
The exhibit’s title, “Through the Descent, Like the Return,” also touches on people coming into the space and mentally returning to a personal memory, such as their childhood in East LA or maybe Mexico, she says.
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.
Given the recent ICE raids and protests in LA, Castillo says she wants her art to “elevate the amount of intelligence and technique and knowledge and dignity” of undocumented immigrants’ manual work.
“This is more than people being the laborers. This is about people being humans. And there's so much beauty. And I just think what we learn from our communities is resourcefulness and ingenuity. And it's a pretty vital part of our society and cultural fabric that makes up LA.”