Taylor Moon Castagnari (born 1996) is a contemporary, American artist and professor of design at California State University, San Bernardino.

 

Her primary mediums are animation and digital illustration. Her animations are divided into poetically-narrated, metaphoric animations and documentary style animations. She prints & exhibits the illustrations from these animated films alongside the videos. Her metaphoric animations connect unlike ideas in order to encourage others to rethink everyday constructs and biases. Her documentary animations share the personal histories of individuals who display strength amidst hardship.

 

Education

She received a double major in Studio Art, BA, and Art History, BA at the [[University of California, Santa Barbara]], graduating in 3 years as Summa Cum Laude. She received a Master of Fine Arts in Art from the University of Oxford's Ruskin School of Art, wherein, she received a Levett Scholarship

 

Exhibitions

In August 2022, her solo-exhibition, "The Drive-Thru Nation – Symbolic Representations of Flags in Everyday Life," was exhibited at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art. In this exhibit, she features artist, Samson Kambalu in a combined interview and animation, wherein, the two artists speak about the roles that play, color, and culture enact in their work. In this exhibition, Moon looks at how the aesthetics of fast food noticeboards, highway signage, and other off-the-road attractions speak to deeper truths about American subcultures. This work was also featured by plural.world in an exhibition, Post-COVID Urban Mobilities.

 

In February 2023, she garnered another solo-exhibition at the Sasse Museum of Art for her show, "The Balancing Act – Art, Psychology, and Technique in American Cheerleading." This exhibit looks at the elements of balance and flexibility in both cheerleading and psychology. She uses the topic cheerleading as a means to bridge the topic of mental health.

 

Moon was interviewed by Samson Kambalu as his artist pick in the Frieze Magazine article, "Kambalu, Samson. “Artists’ Artists: Samson Kambalu Is Rallying for Taylor Moon.” In this article, her work, "The Nomad" is featured. This work connects the nomadic lifestyles of astronauts and the unhoused community alike, to highlight the veneration society gives to one archetype and the stigma that is projected onto the other. This work was also exhibited by Orbit Art Gallery.

 

Her animation, "The Faces of Each Generation," was displayed by Las Laguna Art Gallery's exhibition, "Icons" (September, 2021). Therein, using animation, she illustrated and then morphed the faces of several celebrities together over time. Her work, Lost and De-Colonial, was exhibited in 2020 by Next Museum, a virtual museum in partnership with Museum Ulm and NRW Forum. In this work, she considers how satellites create the illusion of having an intimate knowledge of a place that the viewer has never visited. She explores concepts, such as map–territory relation and counter-mapping, investigating what sort of colonizing histories imbue maps while finding playful ways to subvert that power dynamic.

 

Moon took part in the exhibition, "Living-Room: In Between Realms" at Open-Walls, a virtual museum based out of Southeast Los Angeles (2020). She displayed her animated film, "The Quarantine from a Digital Virus" at the Spiva Art Gallery in Joplin, Missouri (August, 2020). This animation was shown in the exhibition, "Wish We Made It There." In the aforementioned animation, she imagines how the COVID-19 pandemic would change circumstantially if viruses transmitted not only from animals to people but also from computers to people. Through animation, she envisions a world in which people quarantine from technology. Her work, "Wake and Review" was displayed within the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum in June, 2017. The American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics featured Moon's animation, "Walk with Me," in an article entitled, "An Animated Portrait of Inaccessibly High-Cost Care" (August, 2021) 

 

Career

Moon became an Assistant Professor of Design at Missouri Southern State University at the age of 22. During that time, she presented at the Caribbean Developers Conference in 2019. She later went on to teach as an Assistant Professor of Design at California State University, San Bernardino.