www.beatrizcortez.com:
Beatriz Cortez, Glacial Erratic, 2020.
Commissioned by the Frieze Lifewtr Sculpture Prize. Steel. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Casey Kelbaugh / Frieze.
www.monumentlab.com:
Her sculptural work engages with migration as an experience of colliding times and spaces. Past, present, and future coincide; memory informs the present and mobilizes to imagine better futures. Cortez s work is often speculative, invoking otherworldly refuges like the space station. It is also resolutely material, invested in the dialogue between a piece of steel and the natural elements. Her monuments to immigrants both human and nonhuman destabilize the monument s longstanding association with fixity and instead pay tribute to nomadic simultaneity, to what has come before and what could yet be.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Los Angeles. After growing up in San Salvador, at the age of eighteen, Cortez fled El Salvador s Civil War.
Her work is currently on view throughout the Americas, from the Museo de Arte de El Salvador and Panama City s Museo de Arte Contempor neo, to MSU Broad Art Museum and finally to The Lux Art Institute.
www.beatrizcortez.com:
Made of steel frame and sheet metal, Glacial Erratic evokes an ancient boulder, like the numerous glacial erratics that populate the landscape in New York City.
During the last Ice Age, the melting ice opened grooves on the Manhattan bedrock and deposited numerous glacial erratics all over the landscape. These large masses of rock differ in mineral content, in look, in size, and shape, from the native rocks in the local landscape.
Visible all over the city, in Central Park, Prospect Park, Battle Hill, the Bronx, among many other sites all over the City, the matter that forms these rocks documents their migration before the human era, as well as the moment in which they emerged from the ice cap cover. As they were exposed to the light and to cosmic rays, the erratics were also touched by radiation, generating a process that documents their migration and the passing of time. Placed in the context of Rockefeller Center, the sculpture ages as it is exposed to the elements and human traffic while marking different temporalities and making visible the planetary nature of ancient migration.
www.monumentlab.com:
Carolyn Fornoff: Can you tell us a bit about that work, and how it dialogues with the installation site, as well as with topics like migration and climate change?
Beatriz Cortez: Yes, I had the memory of these rocks because my parents got married in New York and my brothers were born in New York and during my childhood I had seen many images of them interacting with these rocks before I was born.
So I went to Central Park and later to Prospect Park and other parts of Manhattan looking for glacial erratics and imagining a time before the city was built in this place. I thought it was important and powerful to think of long temporalities, like the ancient Maya did, and to see these rocks as migrants brought here by the melting glaciers millions of years ago, and to think of the planet in flow and of migration as planetary and millenary.
Time is one of the fundamental concepts that inform my work. Unsealed steel makes visible the organic quality of the material, and the temporalities that mark matter, and the ways in which nothing is static, everything is in motion and in a process of transformation. It also gives a dimension to my work that is closer to an experience than to an object.
www.monumentlab.com:
I think that another world is possible with the same resources that we have. This is why I decided to make the bed, crib, petate, shelter, awnings that I made as part of the Cosmic series, all with the same materials that surround the children in the detention centers.
Children need magic, the magic of their childhood is being robbed from these children. I think making these detention centers and what they represent visible is important because invisibility is one of the main reasons these places exist all around us. But I also think we all need to work at producing magic and helping repair the childhood of the children that these years of inhuman migratory policies have damaged.
www.monumentlab.com:
Her sculptural work engages with migration as an experience of colliding times and spaces. Past, present, and future coincide; memory informs the present and mobilizes to imagine better futures. Cortez s work is often speculative, invoking otherworldly refuges like the space station. It is also resolutely material, invested in the dialogue between a piece of steel and the natural elements. Her monuments to immigrants both human and nonhuman destabilize the monument s longstanding association with fixity and instead pay tribute to nomadic simultaneity, to what has come before and what could yet be.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Los Angeles. After growing up in San Salvador, at the age of eighteen, Cortez fled El Salvador s Civil War.
Her work is currently on view throughout the Americas, from the Museo de Arte de El Salvador and Panama City s Museo de Arte Contempor neo, to MSU Broad Art Museum and finally to The Lux Art Institute.
www.wikipedia.org:
Beatriz Cortez is a Los Angeles based artist and scholar from El Salvador.
In 2017, Cortez was featured in a science fiction-themed exhibit at University of California, Riverside, and in 2018, her work was shown in the Made in L.A. group artist exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She also earned an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Cortez currently teaches in the Central American Studies department at California State University, Northridge.
According to Cortez, her work explores 'simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration'. Cortez has received the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the 2017 Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the 2016 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Beatriz Cortez, Glacial Erratic, 2020.
Commissioned by the Frieze Lifewtr Sculpture Prize. Steel. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Casey Kelbaugh / Frieze.
www.monumentlab.com:
Her sculptural work engages with migration as an experience of colliding times and spaces. Past, present, and future coincide; memory informs the present and mobilizes to imagine better futures. Cortez s work is often speculative, invoking otherworldly refuges like the space station. It is also resolutely material, invested in the dialogue between a piece of steel and the natural elements. Her monuments to immigrants both human and nonhuman destabilize the monument s longstanding association with fixity and instead pay tribute to nomadic simultaneity, to what has come before and what could yet be.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Los Angeles. After growing up in San Salvador, at the age of eighteen, Cortez fled El Salvador s Civil War.
Her work is currently on view throughout the Americas, from the Museo de Arte de El Salvador and Panama City s Museo de Arte Contempor neo, to MSU Broad Art Museum and finally to The Lux Art Institute.
www.beatrizcortez.com:
Made of steel frame and sheet metal, Glacial Erratic evokes an ancient boulder, like the numerous glacial erratics that populate the landscape in New York City.
During the last Ice Age, the melting ice opened grooves on the Manhattan bedrock and deposited numerous glacial erratics all over the landscape. These large masses of rock differ in mineral content, in look, in size, and shape, from the native rocks in the local landscape.
Visible all over the city, in Central Park, Prospect Park, Battle Hill, the Bronx, among many other sites all over the City, the matter that forms these rocks documents their migration before the human era, as well as the moment in which they emerged from the ice cap cover. As they were exposed to the light and to cosmic rays, the erratics were also touched by radiation, generating a process that documents their migration and the passing of time. Placed in the context of Rockefeller Center, the sculpture ages as it is exposed to the elements and human traffic while marking different temporalities and making visible the planetary nature of ancient migration.
www.monumentlab.com:
Carolyn Fornoff: Can you tell us a bit about that work, and how it dialogues with the installation site, as well as with topics like migration and climate change?
Beatriz Cortez: Yes, I had the memory of these rocks because my parents got married in New York and my brothers were born in New York and during my childhood I had seen many images of them interacting with these rocks before I was born.
So I went to Central Park and later to Prospect Park and other parts of Manhattan looking for glacial erratics and imagining a time before the city was built in this place. I thought it was important and powerful to think of long temporalities, like the ancient Maya did, and to see these rocks as migrants brought here by the melting glaciers millions of years ago, and to think of the planet in flow and of migration as planetary and millenary.
Time is one of the fundamental concepts that inform my work. Unsealed steel makes visible the organic quality of the material, and the temporalities that mark matter, and the ways in which nothing is static, everything is in motion and in a process of transformation. It also gives a dimension to my work that is closer to an experience than to an object.
www.monumentlab.com:
I think that another world is possible with the same resources that we have. This is why I decided to make the bed, crib, petate, shelter, awnings that I made as part of the Cosmic series, all with the same materials that surround the children in the detention centers.
Children need magic, the magic of their childhood is being robbed from these children. I think making these detention centers and what they represent visible is important because invisibility is one of the main reasons these places exist all around us. But I also think we all need to work at producing magic and helping repair the childhood of the children that these years of inhuman migratory policies have damaged.
www.monumentlab.com:
Her sculptural work engages with migration as an experience of colliding times and spaces. Past, present, and future coincide; memory informs the present and mobilizes to imagine better futures. Cortez s work is often speculative, invoking otherworldly refuges like the space station. It is also resolutely material, invested in the dialogue between a piece of steel and the natural elements. Her monuments to immigrants both human and nonhuman destabilize the monument s longstanding association with fixity and instead pay tribute to nomadic simultaneity, to what has come before and what could yet be.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Los Angeles. After growing up in San Salvador, at the age of eighteen, Cortez fled El Salvador s Civil War.
Her work is currently on view throughout the Americas, from the Museo de Arte de El Salvador and Panama City s Museo de Arte Contempor neo, to MSU Broad Art Museum and finally to The Lux Art Institute.
www.wikipedia.org:
Beatriz Cortez is a Los Angeles based artist and scholar from El Salvador.
In 2017, Cortez was featured in a science fiction-themed exhibit at University of California, Riverside, and in 2018, her work was shown in the Made in L.A. group artist exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She also earned an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Cortez currently teaches in the Central American Studies department at California State University, Northridge.
According to Cortez, her work explores 'simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration'. Cortez has received the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the 2017 Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the 2016 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.