Castellanos, Gino
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Gino Castellanos
Gino Castellanos is an MFA student in printmaking at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Gino Castellanos headshotGino Castellanos is a Cuban-American printmaker who obtained his bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from Florida Atlantic University in 2020. Prior to attending graduate school in Knoxville, he worked as a freelance designer and artist. Gino lived in Cuba until the age of 16, where he saw and experienced a different culture, with enough hardships that shaped his character. When coming to America in 2011, he understood that the only way forward was with diligence and discipline, which he has used to focus on his education. Today, other than his family, Gino’s primary focus is his work and getting better at it with each passing day.
Artist Statement
As an artist, I’ve made it my purpose to use my own private experiences and extensive years of research and learning to create a body of work that tells archetypal stories that can be universal and relatable. I intend to go deeper than usual in my work and touch upon topics that are more critical and universal than whatever the current social issues might be. I strive to make my work relatable today as well as a thousand years into the future.
My work takes is informed by Mexican Printmakers’ graphic aesthetic and German expressionism. I use exaggerated expressions, movements, or anatomy to express feeling in my own individual way. I also work tirelessly to learn and absorb as much worldwide culture as possible to create universal artwork. In my series “To the Beat of the Distant Drum,” I use Afro-Cuban influences to talk about the embodiment of human emotion and how we, as living creatures, learn to deal with positive and negative feelings, and how to balance them in the most effective way possible. My goal is to show the use of every emotion, and how when thrown into extreme order and extreme chaos, the result can be either the death of society or the meaning of life.