For Foundations 2025 (Jul 14 – Aug 8, 2025) —Artsy’s online fair dedicated to emerging art—Detroit-based artist Shaina Kasztelan presented a series of works that bridged painting, sculpture, collage, and installation. Her practice unfolded as a vivid, immersive critique of consumer culture, where humor and chaos collided within psychedelic dreamscapes.
Operating between curated control and deliberate disorder, Kasztelan reimagined the detritus of consumerism through a distinctly feminine, playful lens. Everyday kitsch commodities became portals into a surreal world where glitter, plastic, and irony coexisted with sincerity. The result was both dazzling and disorienting: a celebration of material excess that simultaneously exposed its emptiness.
Her works balanced visual seduction and conceptual rigor, using color, texture, and absurdity to explore the tension between pleasure and disgust. Through these juxtapositions, Kasztelan addressed the paradox of living within systems of overproduction and desire—where consumption becomes both a comfort and a trap. The work’s humor functioned as a disarming entry point, softening critique while amplifying its resonance.
Deeply rooted in the visual language of American suburbia, her artistic vocabulary drew from the aesthetics of fast-food franchises, strip malls, and suburban sameness. By transforming these familiar artifacts into surreal assemblages, Kasztelan invited reflection on nostalgia, fantasy, and the strange poetry hidden within the banal.
I want people to feel something they can’t immediately name, like they’ve stumbled into a dream half-remembered from childhood that is both sweet and eerie at once. I hope to evoke the moment you realized the world isn’t what you were taught to believe, when innocence started to decay but left its perfume behind.” – Shaina Kasztelan
About the Artist
Shaina Kasztelan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Detroit, Michigan. She creates immersive environments and vibrant sculptural paintings that explore the contradictions of pleasure, consumption, and identity in late capitalism. Kasztelan received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies (2012) and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2024).
Her work has been exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, among others. In addition to her studio practice, she has created numerous large-scale murals, including for NXNE Music Festival (Toronto), Facultad de Artes y Diseño UNAM (Mexico City), and as an assistant for the Glass City River Wall (Toledo), the largest mural in the United States.
