Commonwealth and Council

One eye yes, one eye no, Beatriz Cortez’s first solo exhibition with Commonwealth and Council, examines the Earth's movement and that of its inhabitants. Through steel constructions of existing and imagined objetos antiguos, Cortez proposes a shifting world predicated on the ceaseless circulation and transmutation of matter through vehicles such as volcanic eruptions and traveling meteors. By invoking these flows, Cortez asserts that migration is a geological constant and that these fugitive and self-organizing particles comprise all matter, visible in chance condensations like evidentiary bones—a living foundation for the earth. For Cortez these particulate tectonics align with conceptions of the underworld, a spirit world outside of human access or comprehension.

One such accumulation of time and space is the meteorite. Considered a cosmic missive, its fiery passage through the atmosphere resembles journeying through a portal between the earthly and spirit worlds. Cortez seeks to shift our focus from the sky to the underworld, positing that the matter lodged beneath the earth’s surface may also be considered meteors, traveling up from under the ground through an analogous process of transformation—as above, so below. Her welded-steel meteors represent the kinetic potential latent to apparently static materials, posited as go-betweens for the spirit underworld and the tangible world that we know on the surface of the Earth. By reimagining these materials as cosmic bodies, Cortez upends hierarchies of “under” and “over,” returning the vestiges of industry to their organic origins.