Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975 Mexico City, Mexico), ¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, 7 (columna guerreros serpiente) (Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?, 7 (serpent warriors column)), 2015, Low temperature co-fired ceramic (clay from Atzompa, Oaxaca), metallic structure, 169 1/4 in. (429.9 cm), Museum purchase with funds provided by Wellesley College Friends of Art 2021.16

The Davis Museum recently purchased a monumental ceramic sculpture by Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball in honor of the 2019 Friends of Art Patron’s Trip to Mexico City. ¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, 7 (columna guerreros serpiente) (Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?, 7 (serpent warriors column)) is the first work by this major mid-career artist in the Davis collections. Castillo Deball earned a BFA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1997, and then completed a postgraduate program at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands in 2003. Deball was awarded the Prix de Rome in 2004, and has had solo exhibitions at museums globally, including the New Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, among others. Her work draws inspiration from a wide range of sources and disciplines, including history, science, anthropology, literature, archaeology, and the visual arts, and she uses these different perspectives to better understand the roles that objects play in our identity and history.

For her 2015 series Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time? Castillo Deball collaborated with the Coatlicue pottery workshop in Atzompa, Oaxaca, exploring their relationship with the state’s rich archaeological legacy. The totems created do not visually reference the folk art produced in the community today, except in their unglazed tan surfaces. The series began when Deball and her collaborators created two artworks that each told the story of the origins of the universe: one in which it was created in one day and another in one hundred days. Realizing that both versions told the same story, they developed a series of columns comprised of parts that can be assembled on a metal support in a variety of ways, and that can be read from either direction: top down or bottom up. The individual parts have distinct symbolic meanings. Some allude to pre-Columbian sculptural heads, which were in the personal collection of artist Rufino Tamayo. Other twisted or cog-like sections reference industrial machinery.  Deball has explained that ¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento? “challenges the idea of a static tradition that should not be changed in order to exist, broadening the debate of what archeology is in the present and how it can be constantly updated.”¹

¹ Mariana Castillo Deball, ¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, Museo de Arte Contemporáno de Oaxaca, Oaxaca Mexico, January 24 – April 04, 2015 <https://castillodeball.org/project/quien-medira-el-espacio-quien-me-dira...