The Volcano that Left
Storm King Art Center, New York
May 20 – November 13, 2023
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 will be positioned in dialogue with one another, reflecting the artist’s journeying across multiple spatial and temporal realities. Working in steel, Cortez fashions 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 reverberate across time, drawing connection to events such as the movement of the Maya or her own migration amid the Salvadorian Civil War in 1989, a catastrophe which displaced a million people. The artist clarifies 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, Ilopango, 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.
Shifting Center
EMPAC, Troy, NY
Hudson River Preview October 28-29, 2023
Exhibition opens November 3, 2023
Shifting Center stages the process of listening to infrasonic landscapes, acoustic architectures, and unsounded instruments across scales of time. The exhibition will comprise sculptural, moving-image, and spatial-audio installations presented throughout the concert hall, proscenium stage, and studios at EMPAC.
A “shifting center” is a technical term from the field of acoustics that describes the perceived dislocation in the position of a sound source. Supported by the Teiger Foundation, and building on research funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the exhibition considers two opposing tendencies: dislocation—how objects, artworks, and cultural belongings are taken from their original context and silenced through the mechanisms of museological preservation and display—and location—how architecture and acoustics impact exhibitions as resonant spaces of situated listening.
With contributions from Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Maurice Louca, and Clarissa Tossin, among others, Shifting Center will utilize theatrical infrastructure and spatial audio technologies, such as higher-order ambisonics and wave field synthesis, and propose techniques and practices to locate and listen to contemporary artworks that are themselves locating and listening to past events, instruments, architectures, and landscapes. EMPAC’s building was designed to focus on tuning architectural acoustics and it was listened to throughout the building process. How can these spaces also tune-in to the systemic dislocation on which they are built?
If the colonial museum interrupts the time of the object, then the artworks in the exhibition follow the dislocation to foreground circulation through movement, temporality, and recursion. All three aspects are present in Beatriz Cortez’s monumental sculpture, Ilopango, The Volcano that Left. Imperceptible frequencies sounded before the Terra Blanca Joven volcanic eruption of circa 536 CE blasted magma that traveled thousands of miles into the stratosphere reflecting light from the sun away from the earth to produce a multi-year winter that plagued the ancient Maya civilization reaching Europe, Asia, and Antarctica. Cortez describes “the volcano that left” as an act of migration and considers what it would mean for it to return.
Escalón accompanies de Gandarias’ experiments translating infrasounds from the seismic activity of the Fuego volcano of Guatemala into an orchestral work that resists its place in the canon of western classical music. Candiani activates Hole-in-the-Rock, a geological formation that resembles a loudspeaker. Chettur and Visser position the axes of a dancing body in the mandala-like geometry of an amphitheater at the archaeological site of Nagarjunakonda, South India, displaced and relocated by the building of a hydroelectric dam. Tossin entwines the voice of K’iche’ poet Rosa Chávez with the sound of Alethia Lozano Birrueta playing 3D replicas of ancient Maya flutes that are held in museum collections. The microtonal composition of Louca’s ensemble searches for missing vowels through the imagination of animal vocalizations, magical texts, and demotic songs. And the screeching frequencies of Luger’s Aztek whistles sound the transition between the living and the dead.
Shifting Center is choreographed not just in space but also in time. The unique technical capacities of EMPAC support an exhibition format and its sonic and experiential potential. By tuning each work in relation to each other, the exhibition will reach across disciplinary boundaries to simultaneously inhabit their attendant temporalities, such as the evental nature of performance and the durational scale of an exhibition. While Cortez’s sculpture draws our attention to the still continuing geological and ecological effects of a past eruption, de Gandarias’ composition reminds us that the volcano performs for us every day as an instrument of the earth.
Shifting Center will extend through a partnership with Storm King Art Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School to support Cortez’s sculpture, which will sail up the Hudson River from the artist’s solo exhibition at Storm King to EMPAC just prior to the exhibition opening of Shifting Center. Escalón will document the river journey for a future film.
Shifting Center is curated by Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse.
BEATRIZ CORTEZ 