James Castle: Memory Palace

Brief Description: "American artist James Castle inhabited a world of utter quiet, where the mundane became miraculous. Born to a family of homesteaders in the mountains of central Idaho in 1899, he was deaf from an early age. Perhaps not coincidentally, he developed an extraordinary visual and spatial memory. This gave him a dictionary of images of his home, farm, and valley that he replicated and manipulated for the rest of his life in a series of extraordinary soot and saliva drawings. Castle's particular environment and experience gave him access to other, more surprising sources for his art. His parents ran the local post office and store, which supplied an array of images from burgeoning early twentieth century print culture. He collected scrap paper and cardboard, which he cut up and stitched together into farm animals, furniture, and clothing. Castle spent several years at a school for the deaf, where he picked up only the rudiments of language. But he used his knowledge of let