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COLD REALITY
Artist Xavier Cortada takes
environmental awareness to the South Pole
By Deserač
E. Del Campo
Photo by Deserač E. Del Campo
Pubished in Miami Monthly Magazine, April 2007
Many artists have traveled the world in pursuit of
inspiration, but few have found it on the South Pole. Xavier
Cortada did just that recently under the National Science
Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.
"Xavier's Antarctic work is
dynamic and multi-faceted," said program director Kim
Silverman. "[His] project represents a new and progressive
dimension in artistic expression for the program, adding an
element of conceptual interpretation to the growing body of
Antarctic art and literary works."
Cortada did not embark on his
career to create art on the South Pole – in fact his original
occupation was as a lawyer and advocate for troubled teens.
But a trip to South Africa in the mid-1990s changed all that.
"It
was the baboons!" exclaims the 42- year-old Cuban American,
recalling the awe-inspiring wildlife and natural beauty that
inspired him to change professions. A natural-born artist
raised in an artistic family, Cortada felt his calling and
acted on it.
His quaint and cozy art studio,
just blocks from the Brickell financial district, is strewn
with samples of his work and tools of the trade. One table is
covered end-to-end with bottles of paint, creating their own
mosaic of color and design.
Over the past decade, Cortada
has produced murals, paintings, glass mosaics and exhibits
around the world. Examples of his creativity are visible
throughout Miami, from his "Miami Mangrove Forest" on I-95 to
Miami City Hall, and the Miami-Dade Juvenile Courthouse to
U.S. 1 in South Miami.
"His work is very much tied to
his physical and cultural surroundings," said René Morales,
assistant curator with the Miami Art Museum. Morales
commissioned Cortada's "Absence of Place" for an exhibit on
the Miami real estate boom. "The show dealt with an amazingly
narrow topic, but his piece expressed the cultural and
emotional effects associated with the physical. It was
absolutely perfect for the show."
That skill was
expressed again early this year in the South Pole, where
Cortada created various pieces for the Antarctic Artists and
Writers Program. For a painting of Sir Ernest Shackleton
(1874-1922), who made several expeditions to the icy frontier
but never reached the South Pole, Cortada mixed melted ice
with watercolors and soil samples from Antartica's McMurdo Dry
Valleys.
"I used pieces of Shackleton's
Antarctica to place him conceptually in the South Pole, the
place that eluded him in life. The place he never went and
always wanted to be," the artist explained.
In another installation,
Cortada used an element often represented in his work – a
mangrove seedling. The artists "planted" an ice sculpture
replica of a seedling in the ice sheet. In 150,000 years, the
seedling will have moved with the ice sheet to reach the
Weddell Sea, where it will symbolically "set roots." Cortada
says the journey symbolizes human evolution through time, and
raises questions about what our world will be like 150,000
years from now.
For his "Endangered World,"
installation, he combined art and science to plant 24 flags
around the South Pole, each with the name of a threatened
animal species. The flags were placed at the corresponding
longitudinal degree where the species is facing extinction. A
similar idea expressed in the "Longitudinal Installation" was
accomplished with 12 black shoes placed in a circle, each
corresponding to the longitudinal location where global
changes have affected inhabitants' way of life. That
installation will be on display at the UN World Environment
Day observations in Norway, on June 5.
Cortada's "Markers"
installation tied in to the 50th anniversary of the opening of
the South Pole station on Jan.
4. It featured 50 variously colored flags placed along a
500-meter stretch of ice. Each flag was marked with a year and
the coordinates of a place on Earth where something
significant happened.
"For example, for 1973 I used
the coordinates of Sydney, Australia, to represent the
construction of the Sydney Opera House," Cortada said. "I was
making the point of how the world has dramatically changed
over these 50 years.
"What I was trying to do in the
South Pole was [illustrate] how we fit into this planet,"
Cortada said. "How we may think that we are the ones who are
in control and own this planet, but our role is custodial in
nature and we need to try our best to leave it a little bit
better than we found it."
Selections from Cortada's South
Pole art are on display through May 5 at the Kunsthaus Miami
Contemporary Art Space, 3312 N. Miami Ave. in the Wynwood Art
District.