What makes a city feel like home? For many, particularly immigrants and minorities, it’s not the skyline or tourist landmarks, but the small, beloved rituals of everyday life. The corner store clerk who remembers your order, the soft hum of Spanglish in the air, and the scent of Fabuloso drifting out of open windows on Saturday mornings.
Andrea Castillo’s solo exhibition Counter Space, which was on view June and July at SWIM Gallery in San Francisco, was a tender and radical tribute to the immigrant-run storefronts that shaped the artist’s upbringing in Los Angeles, while also speaking to a larger narrative of diasporic belonging, economic survival, and cultural inheritance.
Counter Space arrived at a moment of heightened urgency, further contextualized by ongoing ICE raids and deportations, and the continued criminalization of working-class and undocumented immigrant communities. Castillo’s work doesn’t directly document these political violences, but her painted vignettes vibrate with the quiet resilience of those who persist and thrive in their aftermath. In these small-scale paintings, rich with detail and saturated with warmth, Castillo captures the textures of urban life in neighborhoods often dismissed or deemed unsafe, reframing them as sites of care, intimacy, and sacred repetition.
The warm reds, ochres, and sun-faded oranges featured across Counter Space echo the Los Angeles light and the inviting aura of the spaces she paints. The small scale of the works requires viewers to get close. In doing so, Castillo encourages a slower, more intentional viewing experience, one that resists the typical pace of gallery-goers who breeze through rooms without pause. This is not work that shouts, but it speaks with clarity.
Rather than presenting immigrant life through spectacle, Castillo offers us a different kind of archive: one grounded in collective memory and visual tenderness. Many of the paintings draw from photos taken during her commutes across Los Angeles. Others are sourced from personal family history, including her father’s former shoe store in The Santee Alley. Her gaze is loving and familiar, not anthropological. These are not anonymous spaces, but ecosystems, dense with connection, movement, labor, and love.
Castillo’s gaze is unmistakably loving; she paints fluorescent lights and corner-store clutter with the tenderness of a still life. Every detail, from a jug of Fabuloso to a hanging air freshener, feels dignified and intentional. These storefronts aren’t just sites of transaction, but soft infrastructures of care, where undocumented families navigate daily life, where children translate for elders, where neighbors swap stories. Within marginalized communities, they sustain not just economies but identities. Castillo’s intimate renderings offer a quiet but radical insistence: that these lives matter, and that their everyday rituals are worth preserving.
Working in oil paint on oil paper, a material less rigid and more intimate than stretched canvas, Castillo translates these snapshots into vivid, emotionally charged tableaus. The choice of paper introduces a softness and immediacy, allowing texture and gesture to take center stage. Her figures are exaggerated, with elongated limbs or disproportionately small heads, creating a surreal, slightly off-kilter sense of embodiment. These formal distortions mirror the elasticity of memory and identity, suggesting how cultural belonging often defies the neat boundaries of realism or representation.
Take Cashier (2024), for example. At first glance, it’s a simple scene: a figure stands at a counter, speaking to someone behind it. But the body language, the tilt of the heads, the relaxed posture suggest friendship, or maybe even gossip. This isn’t a cold transaction. It’s a check-in, a moment of recognition. It’s the everyday relational labor that keeps communities alive. These are the people who remember your birthday, who slip in a lollipop for your kid, who know the names of your uncles even if they haven’t seen them in years.
Castillo’s visual lexicon draws heavily from the specific cultural and material markers of working-class Latin American communities in Southern California—the rows of laundry detergent bottles in Gifts (2024); the animal figurines in Foca and Roma (2024); the dusty signage of E L.A. Tires (2025). These items may seem mundane, but under Castillo’s brush, they become emblematic of care and continuity. The cleaning products evoke not just household rituals, but also the invisible labor of immigrant women. The figurines recall childhood trips to the store, when a tired parent might grab a small treat on the way home from work. These objects carry emotional charge; they are vessels of memory. By memorializing the emblems of Southern Californian and Latine material culture, Castillo affirms their cultural significance and emotional weight—offering viewers, especially those from similar communities, a sense of recognition, dignity, and home. For others, the work opens a window into the layered intimacies that structure immigrant life, encouraging slower looking and deeper empathy. In either case, these paintings transform the ordinary into something enduring.
Tire shops—as represented in Tire Change (2024), E L.A. Tires, and No Warranty (2024)—are like tienditas and botanicas, serving as vital infrastructure in immigrant neighborhoods. They’re spaces where language is shared and translated, where families gather, and where secondhand parts are a lifeline for workers and single parents. They also operate as informal social centers, not unlike barbershops or bodegas. Castillo’s decision to include them emphasizes the ecosystem of labor and trust that sustains her community.
Perhaps most powerfully, Counter Space reclaims the aesthetic and emotional landscape of “home” from the margins. These storefronts are overlooked by urban planners, erased by gentrification, or reduced to stereotypes. Castillo insists on their beauty. In her hands, the corner store becomes a cultural altar, the tire shop a monument to survival. Her paintings ask us to see these spaces not as peripheral, but central to the city, to memory, to belonging.Los Angeles has long been shaped by immigrants. Castillo’s work recognizes them not only in the grand narratives of migration or resistance, but in the small, daily gestures that make a life. Counter Space doesn’t just depict community, it creates it. For those who have lived in and loved these spaces, it feels like a homecoming. And for those who haven’t, it offers an invitation to look closer.
Andrea Castillo: Counter Space
SWIM gallery, San Francisco, CA
May 13–June 18, 2025