Meet Haley // Evan Castro // Ho | Architects, Musicians, & Visual Artists

We had the good fortune of connecting with Haley // Evan Castro // Ho and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Haley // Evan, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
There was a point at which we had produced too many kinds of things; this required a kind of container, a mechanism to categorize and sort through our various activities and ambitions. Spanning from audio and visual works to performances and architectures, Corner Condition emerged as a confluence of interdisciplinary behavior. As such, the name Corner Condition functions eponymously, referring to a plurality of media, intersections, and overlappings.
The theoretical foundation of our practice is a passionate criticism of the postmodern condition, that is, of late-capitalist neoliberal extractionist hegemony. As laughably academic as this description sounds, we are infatuated with the idea of facilitating conversations about alterity.
We are simply queer proles looking for a way out.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Our work is an unusual take on architecture – we are a spatially oriented practice with an edge of media promiscuity. Through installations, performances, or production styles we strive to generate social assemblages, emphasizing cultural effects over any particular aesthetic or object oriented agenda.

To elaborate, we recently had an exhibition in the DTLA Arts District. Our prints were suspended in the air with repurposed climbing rope. We used our genitals as stamps, coated with makeup and slammed onto ARCH D (24”x36”) heavy weight paper. Layered onto these prints, we sprayed stenciled a quote from the Communist Manifesto;

“As the repulsiveness of the work increases the wage decreases. The burden of toil also increases by prolongation of the working hours. By increase of the work exacted in a given time, by increased speed of the machinery, he becomes an appendage of the machine.”

The performance aspect of Corner Condition serves to disrupt a dispassionate atmosphere; we yell our lyrics and play jazz guitar solos alongside pulsing beats with tempos often upwards of 170 BPM, urging the listener to engage with the space energetically, to dance and socialize with intent.

Currently, we’re excited about collaborating with SCI-Arch graduate student Mackenzie Champlin on virtual set design for a speculative film installation, and we’ll be releasing a new single on August 18th!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
The span of public infrastructure in Los Angeles leaves much to be desired. Unless one is actively spending money, there is often an urge to leave, to move on to the next activity. For a visiting friend, an ideal day would include gathering a grip of picnic supplies and heading as far north in Malibu as we see fit for a picnic and a swim. As for the evening, we’d head downtown to see a friend DJ a warehouse rave or meet up with a friend at their house for an impromptu dinner party.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
We could begin by listing the names of the authors on our bookshelf, or naming the video artists and filmmakers we admire, but that would turn into a long-winded reference list. We would like to mention our great friends Jacob Tennant and Isaac Foster. Jacob is an amazing architect and friend who has supported our project from a very early stage. Isaac is a very talented space-maker who has set up many events and performances, including our first together. We love them.

Website: cornercondition.com

Instagram: www.instagram.com/corner.condition

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCro-oWVB717PWskBcVaGhlg

Other: spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0oLEVhi38oprboMuNqFX6e?si=Q_noZaoNQyCRUuQ3qwHIaQ

Image Credits
Huni Ho Taryn Segal Luna Lectez José Vazquez