Beatriz Cortez’s exhibition "The Volcano That Left" presents new and recent large-scale works by the Los Angeles-based sculptor. With a vista from Storm King’s Museum Hill across the Hudson Valley landscape, ancient, geologic, and cosmic structures are positioned in dialogue with one another, reflecting the artist’s journey across multiple spatial and temporal realities. Working in steel, Cortez fashioned each sculpture by hand, improvising to create undulating surfaces and organic forms that echo the surrounding landscape.
Eric Booker, Associate Curator at Storm King Art Center, said: "Beatriz Cortez’s multidisciplinary practice explores the experience of migration through the lens of simultaneity, proposing other forms of existence that lie outside our definition. By placing her sculptures outdoors at Storm King, the exhibition highlights the integral role that nature plays within her work, shifting the notion of migration beyond the human. Over the course of the exhibition, the forces of time and motion will change...how visitors experience the installation.”
Central to the exhibition is the monumental new work, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left (2023), a speculative reconstruction of an ancient volcano that erupted in the sixth century C.E. in what is now El Salvador. Cortez considers the ash deposited by the eruption, an event known as Tierra Blanca Joven, as part of the sacred Mayan underworld. The artist imagines how the eruption’s resulting migratory patterns reverberated across time, drawing a connection to events including the movement of the Maya or her own migration amid the Salvadoran Civil War in 1989, a catastrophe which displaced a million people. The artist has stated that a volcanic range unites her two homes, San Salvador and Los Angeles, as lava flows beneath these locations in a borderless underworld, illustrating nature’s disregard for human boundaries.
This multidimensional movement is reflected in another new sculpture, Stela Z, after Quiriguá (Contrary Warrior) (2023), which evokes the form of a Mayan stela to depict the contemporary migration of Cortez’s volcano. Standing eight feet tall, welded-steel glyphs appear across its surface, charting a non-linear chronology of the volcano’s journey throughout its making and installation.
Cosmic Mirror (The Sky Over New York) (2022, reconfigured 2023) considers a non-human perspective. Scattered over the landscape atop Museum Hill and mirroring the constellation Orion above, the eleven-part work’s relative position to the stars changes based on its geographic location. Relating to an ancient Olmec mosaic that was buried underground in order to be seen by the gods of the underworld, the site-specific work lies beyond human perception, only fully comprehended from above due to its scale.
The exhibition reminds us that migration is not defined by humans; it is a universal constant. In the fall, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left will leave Storm King in a performative departure, enacting the absence indicated in the work’s title. The sculpture will journey by boat up the Hudson River to EMPAC in Troy, NY, for the exhibition Shifting Center. The volcano’s journey, presented in partnership with EMPAC—Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, will feature a weekend of collaborative programming along the Hudson River.
In conjunction with the exhibition opening, Storm King will present a virtual public program with Beatriz Cortez on Tuesday, May 23.
Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left is organized by Eric Booker, Associate Curator, with the assistance of Adela Goldsmith, Curatorial Assistant.
Entrada actualizada el el 28 jul de 2023
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