Artist:
Beatriz Cortez
Title:
Ilopango The Volcano That Left
Year:
2023
Adress:
Storm King Art
Website:
www.smarthistory.org:
Beatriz Cortez, Ilopango, The Volcano That Left, 2023, hammered and welded steel, 12 feet high.
Beatriz Cortez, commissioned by EMPAC Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Storm King Art Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School.
www.stormking.org:
Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left brings together new and recent large-scale sculptures by the El Salvador born (1970), Los Angeles based artist. Cortez s multidisciplinary practice considers the experience of migration through the lens of simultaneity, recalling the multiple spatial and temporal realities that immigrants experience at once. Throughout the exhibition, the artist examines geologic, human, and cosmic conditions to imagine other forms of existence that transcend static definition. Moving beyond colonized notions of time and space, Cortez engages Indigenous knowledge and spirituality, philosophy, and the cycles of the planet to reorient our understanding of the past and present and to imagine an alternative future.
` www.beatrizcortez.com:
Sited on Museum Hill with views of the Hudson Highlands in the distance, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left (2023) is a speculative reconstruction of an ancient volcano that erupted in the sixth century C.E. in what is now El Salvador. Composed entirely of steel, Cortez s sculpture imagines what the Ilopango Volcano might have looked like. Rendered through the artist s hand-made process of hammered and welded steel, Cortez s weld marks spread across the surface of the work like cracks or fissures, evoking a geologic formation.
www.stormking.org:
Working in steel, Cortez fashions each sculpture by hand, improvising to create undulating surfaces and organic forms that echo the surrounding landscape. Central to the exhibition is 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 Salvadoran Civil War in 1989, a catastrophe that displaced a million people. Reinforcing nature s disregard for human boundaries, Cortez explains, Lava flows under the volcanic range that unites my two homes, Los Angeles and San Salvador. The underworld is not divided by these borders.
www.beatrizcortez.com:
The Ilopango eruption, which spread what would later come to be known as Tierra Blanca Joven (Young White Earth), was one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history. At its original site what remains today is a volcanic caldera, Lake Ilopango. While there are no visual representations of the volcano, Ilopango looms large in history, its presence felt throughout the environmental and societal changes that it generated. Today, ash deposits from Tierra Blanca Joven can be found in ice core samples as far away as Greenland, reflecting the extent to which the eruption spread across the planet.
Cortez likens the movement of volcanic particles to migration, echoing the movement of the Maya who were displaced after the cataclysmic eruption, and the artist s own migration centuries later amid the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1989. About the work, Cortez has said, My objective is to invite others to imagine long temporalities of the planet, and the Earth in flow at speeds that are too long for us to perceive from our human perspectives and senses. In part, my travels are speculative, they are an effort to trace some of the trajectories followed by Tierra Blanca Joven centuries ago, and they are meant to imagine migration as part of the future and not only as part of our present.
www.rpi.edu:
In making this passage from a sculpture park to a performing arts center, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left proposes a line of questioning: What does it mean to consider sculpture as time-based? And can it become a performance? In (re)enacting a refusal to remain an object transfixed in a landscape, it exposes the fact that sculptures always already carry time, and are the ultimate records of their own making. When we encounter a sculpture as an artwork in an exhibition space, how might we apprehend the histories, geographies, and processes that are latent within it?
With Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, Cortez attends to a popular account of the Tierra Blanca Joven super eruption that took place in the mid-first millennium CE in what is now known as El Salvador. Imperceptible subterranean frequencies sounded before magma and rock were blasted thousands of miles into the stratosphere, reflecting light coming from the sun away from the earth to produce a yearlong winter that affected the ancient Maya civilization and regions beyond. Both geological feature and Indigenous deity, the volcano was dislocated from its site which was transformed into a large depression or caldera that is now the Ilopango Lake. As the volcano exploded into particles that dispersed in all directions, its ash was carried by the atmosphere to fall across the globe, and as far as Antarctica, where it can still be found embedded deep in the ice, a trace in the present or the continuing reverberation of a bygone weather event.
www.beatrizcortez.com:
In the fall, Ilopango will leave Storm King to travel up the Hudson River by boat to its next destination: EMPAC the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Accompanied by a weekend of programming in collaboration with EMPAC and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, visitors will be able to witness the sculpture s continued migration along the currents of the Hudson. As its title suggests, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left moves with a sense of agency, disrupting distinctions between here and there, and past and present, as it charts its own future.
www.airmail.news:
The multimedia artist Beatriz Cortez immigrated to the U.S. from the capital of El Salvador, San Salvador, when she was 18. Cortez is now 55 and lives in California, where she was awarded an MFA by the California Institute of Arts; she also earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State.
Despite living far from her native land, she remains firmly rooted in its traditions. Cortez is primarily a sculptor whose art examines geological, human, and cosmic situations that relate to the experience of migration.
Indigenous customs, spirituality, and philosophy converge in her monumental works. Throughout the Storm King s grounds, new and recent sculptures by Cortez are on view.
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, Ilopango, The Volcano That Left, 2023, hammered and welded steel, 12 feet high.
Beatriz Cortez, commissioned by EMPAC Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Storm King Art Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School.
www.stormking.org:
Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left brings together new and recent large-scale sculptures by the El Salvador born (1970), Los Angeles based artist. Cortez s multidisciplinary practice considers the experience of migration through the lens of simultaneity, recalling the multiple spatial and temporal realities that immigrants experience at once. Throughout the exhibition, the artist examines geologic, human, and cosmic conditions to imagine other forms of existence that transcend static definition. Moving beyond colonized notions of time and space, Cortez engages Indigenous knowledge and spirituality, philosophy, and the cycles of the planet to reorient our understanding of the past and present and to imagine an alternative future.
` www.beatrizcortez.com:
Sited on Museum Hill with views of the Hudson Highlands in the distance, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left (2023) is a speculative reconstruction of an ancient volcano that erupted in the sixth century C.E. in what is now El Salvador. Composed entirely of steel, Cortez s sculpture imagines what the Ilopango Volcano might have looked like. Rendered through the artist s hand-made process of hammered and welded steel, Cortez s weld marks spread across the surface of the work like cracks or fissures, evoking a geologic formation.
www.stormking.org:
Working in steel, Cortez fashions each sculpture by hand, improvising to create undulating surfaces and organic forms that echo the surrounding landscape. Central to the exhibition is 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 Salvadoran Civil War in 1989, a catastrophe that displaced a million people. Reinforcing nature s disregard for human boundaries, Cortez explains, Lava flows under the volcanic range that unites my two homes, Los Angeles and San Salvador. The underworld is not divided by these borders.
www.beatrizcortez.com:
The Ilopango eruption, which spread what would later come to be known as Tierra Blanca Joven (Young White Earth), was one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history. At its original site what remains today is a volcanic caldera, Lake Ilopango. While there are no visual representations of the volcano, Ilopango looms large in history, its presence felt throughout the environmental and societal changes that it generated. Today, ash deposits from Tierra Blanca Joven can be found in ice core samples as far away as Greenland, reflecting the extent to which the eruption spread across the planet.
Cortez likens the movement of volcanic particles to migration, echoing the movement of the Maya who were displaced after the cataclysmic eruption, and the artist s own migration centuries later amid the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1989. About the work, Cortez has said, My objective is to invite others to imagine long temporalities of the planet, and the Earth in flow at speeds that are too long for us to perceive from our human perspectives and senses. In part, my travels are speculative, they are an effort to trace some of the trajectories followed by Tierra Blanca Joven centuries ago, and they are meant to imagine migration as part of the future and not only as part of our present.
www.rpi.edu:
In making this passage from a sculpture park to a performing arts center, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left proposes a line of questioning: What does it mean to consider sculpture as time-based? And can it become a performance? In (re)enacting a refusal to remain an object transfixed in a landscape, it exposes the fact that sculptures always already carry time, and are the ultimate records of their own making. When we encounter a sculpture as an artwork in an exhibition space, how might we apprehend the histories, geographies, and processes that are latent within it?
With Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, Cortez attends to a popular account of the Tierra Blanca Joven super eruption that took place in the mid-first millennium CE in what is now known as El Salvador. Imperceptible subterranean frequencies sounded before magma and rock were blasted thousands of miles into the stratosphere, reflecting light coming from the sun away from the earth to produce a yearlong winter that affected the ancient Maya civilization and regions beyond. Both geological feature and Indigenous deity, the volcano was dislocated from its site which was transformed into a large depression or caldera that is now the Ilopango Lake. As the volcano exploded into particles that dispersed in all directions, its ash was carried by the atmosphere to fall across the globe, and as far as Antarctica, where it can still be found embedded deep in the ice, a trace in the present or the continuing reverberation of a bygone weather event.
www.beatrizcortez.com:
In the fall, Ilopango will leave Storm King to travel up the Hudson River by boat to its next destination: EMPAC the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Accompanied by a weekend of programming in collaboration with EMPAC and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, visitors will be able to witness the sculpture s continued migration along the currents of the Hudson. As its title suggests, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left moves with a sense of agency, disrupting distinctions between here and there, and past and present, as it charts its own future.
www.airmail.news:
The multimedia artist Beatriz Cortez immigrated to the U.S. from the capital of El Salvador, San Salvador, when she was 18. Cortez is now 55 and lives in California, where she was awarded an MFA by the California Institute of Arts; she also earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State.
Despite living far from her native land, she remains firmly rooted in its traditions. Cortez is primarily a sculptor whose art examines geological, human, and cosmic situations that relate to the experience of migration.
Indigenous customs, spirituality, and philosophy converge in her monumental works. Throughout the Storm King s grounds, new and recent sculptures by Cortez are on view.
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.