Artforum Reviews Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza's Exhibition at Americas Society

In 1961, when asked to write on the survival of Indigenous iconographies in the colonial period, historian George Kubler, then an authority on the art of the ancient Americas, declared that such a “search” was akin to a “prolonged dissection of the corpse of a civilization.” Regardless of his intent to dispute the authenticity of symbols emptied of their contextual meanings for a modern age—or his desire to indirectly address the ethics of revivalist aesthetics altogether—what’s more striking is the aridity of his analogy, suggesting that the past is a desiccated husk. Kubler’s extinction verdict may well have aimed to reckon with the violence of colonialism by refusing to see artistic possibility within the carnage. Yet this idea perpetuated prevailing viewpoints during that part of the twentieth century when, as the archaeological record expanded, visions of Indigenous life shrank, reflecting a tendency to center artifacts and not the lives of those who created them. More than sixty years later, “Earth and Cosmos,” a two-person show featuring the work of Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza at the Americas Society, asserted the amplitude of engaging the past through a transtemporal matrix that placed objects into metaphysical, speculative, and planetary constellations.

The artists’ dialogue, evolving out of previous collaborations, recast history as an arable though scarred terrain. Much of the gallery’s floor, usually beneath Cortez’s sculptures, was covered by adobe bricks, handmade by esparza, who learned the practice from his father. Artworks and visitors occupied a translocated venue through this raised earthen platform. The pair, who also organized the show, scattered pine needles to sharpen this point: Not only does their work jointly interrogate land and its relationships to territorialization, migration, and dislocation, it also underlines the regenerative nature of soil, and of wanting or endeavoring to return to one’s origins (Cortez was born in El Salvador and relocated to Los Angeles, where esparza was born and raised by Mexican-immigrant parents). The lingering scent and audible crunch of the needles underfoot induced a sensory re-creation of place, generously crafting a portal to geographies made faraway by borders and diasporas...

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