During a recent visit to
Kunsthaus Miami, Xavier Cortada was putting the finishing
touches on his show while ruminating on the "transformative
effects" of his visit to the South Pole.
"Antarctica,"
his solo exhibit, features videos and photographs
accompanied by wall text documenting a handful of
installations he created as part of a two-week National
Science Foundation Antarctica Artists and Writers Program
residency he completed this past December and January. But
it's his remarkable series of pristinely displayed "ice
paintings" that steal the thunder here.
"I conceptualized all the
installations in Miami as part of the proposal for my
project," Cortada explains of his brainy, eco-based works at
the South Pole. "I also packed my canvases, brushes, and
paints before the trip, not knowing what to expect, but
ended up making these ice paintings of and about Antarctica
instead."
While at McMurdo Station
on Ross Island, Cortada worked in a lab alongside
biologists, geologists, oceanographers, physicists, and
other researchers studying the continent.
"It was incredible,"
Cortada says. "A scientist working next to me was
researching how single-cell algae would cluster to avoid
being eaten, while another was examining the effects of
temperature change on life in the Dry Valley, Antarctica's
most arid region."
Inspired by his labmates,
he asked the researchers to provide him with ice core
samples from their investigations and began experimenting
with them to create purely abstract, nine-by-twelve-inch
works. "In part it was accidental," he says. "The vast
solitude and remoteness of the place added to the process."
Those familiar with
Cortada's public murals and expressionistic figurative
paintings, notable for their lush tropical palette, will be
pleasantly knocked back by the radical departure. The
subtle, mixed-media works on paper, bleeding cool
monochromatic tones, look like watercolors from a distance.
On closer inspection the works convey a sense of
Antarctica's flowing ice streams, vast ice sheets, imposing
mountain regions, and isolated frozen deserts, as if
captured from above by a satellite's lens.
They are divided into two
series, in which Cortada uses sediment from Antarctica's Dry
Valley, ice from the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet, and sea
ice from Antarctica's Ross Sea given to him by scientists.
The artist used the
drilled ice core samples as brushes, dipping them into
acrylic paints before applying them to paper, often letting
the ice melt and pool, while the ancient sediment contained
within adhered to the surface.
He later titled the works
by randomly selecting the names of geographic locations such
as bays, glaciers, and coastlines taken from a map of the
continent (which in turn are often named after explorers).
Isolated on a wall near
the entrance of the gallery, an arrangement of four works
from Cortada's "Antarctic Sea Ice Series" seems alchemical
in nature. It's of little wonder that the delightfully
atmospheric pieces pack such a primeval wallop, given the
fact that they are encrusted with thousands of years of
history.
In works like porpoise,
one can detect how the artist used the ice samples to sponge
up rich blue, green, and lavender hues he then applied to
the surface in swirls, evoking an ice cap from a bird's-eye
view. Scratchy layers of sediment and patches of inky black
pools add to its depth and texture.
Across from it, prydz
exudes a scabbier vibe, its background soaked in darker
tones and caked in grit throughout. Against this sooty wash
the artist seems to have placed a chunk of sea ice,
slathered in turquoise, leaving it to melt until the piece
resembled a frosty Rorschach test.
Other pieces, like
bellinghausen and weddell, telegraph how the
artist became looser in his approach to experimentation.
The first shows how he
used two pieces of ice, dipped in a deep purple tone,
placing them inches apart on the paper until the
organic-shape meltdowns took on the look of twin iodine
spills.
The other piece, brushed
across horizontally with multiple washes of icy blue and
generously worked over with sediment streaks, shows how the
artist lifted color-saturated fragments of ice off the
paper, allowing them to drip onto the surface like runny
popsicles. A mood-ringlike splotch in this work is playfully
surrounded by drip splatters that look like a band of
amoebas.
Unfortunately the
photographs documenting the meatier work Cortada executed
during his visit to the South Pole nearly get lost in the
shuffle. Exhibited on a wall at the rear of the gallery,
they depict the projects that earned him his visit to
Antarctica, complemented by elaborate wall texts describing
their process.
This past January 4, on
the 50th anniversary of the opening of the South Pole
station, Cortada created the Markers, planting 51
different colored flags along a 500-meter stretch of the
moving ice sheet covering the Pole. He placed each flag ten
meters apart, approximating the location where the shifting
geographic South Pole stood during each of the past 50
years. Each of the flags also displays the coordinates of an
event Cortada believes "moved the world forward": Sputnik,
the first satellite to orbit Earth in 1957; the Civil Rights
march on Washington in 1963; the United Nations' First World
Conference on Women in 1975; the invention of Prozac in
1987; the end of apartheid in South Africa and Mandela's
election in 1994; and the completion of the Human Genome
Project in 2003.
In Longitudinal
Installation the artist placed twelve identical pairs of
black leather shoes, purchased from a Liberty City wholesale
outlet, in a circle around the South Pole. The text
accompanying the photo notes that the shoes served as a
proxy for a person affected by global climate changes in the
world above, and were placed inches apart along the
corresponding longitudes where those individuals live.
For The 150,000-Year
Journey, Cortada embedded a replica of a mangrove
seedling in the three-kilometer-thick glacial ice sheet
blanketing the Pole. The Cuban-American artist has adopted
the mangrove seedling as a metaphor to address the immigrant
journey — what he refers to as "the displacement, the
solitude, the struggle to simply integrate oneself into
society." As the seedling begins it 150,000-year trek in the
direction of the Weddell Sea, 1400 kilometers away, Cortada
questions how humanity and the earth might evolve in the
time it will theoretically take for the art piece's
completion.
The short video piece
captures Cortada in the process of planting his flags, and
the harsh subzero conditions he endured. All of his
installations were created on the same day, documented, then
taken down.