This contemporary art piece features a cube-like structure composed of twelve individual panels. The visual elements showcase a range of muted colors, including grays, blacks, and hints of rust-like hues, creating a sense of aged and weathered surfaces. The overall composition is a grid-like arrangement, emphasizing the geometric shapes and the interplay of the different textural panels. The subject matter appears to be an exploration of materiality, with the panels depicting a variety of abstract, distressed patterns and markings, reminiscent of industrial or natural processes. The artistic style and technique suggest a minimalist approach, where the focus is on the materiality and the inherent qualities of the surfaces rather than any specific representational imagery. The context of this work may be an artist's commentary on the passage of time, the impermanence of materials, or the relationship between the natural and the man-made. ...
Beatriz Cortez is an artist who creates sculptures and large-scale public installations that focus on themes of migration, movement, and cultural exchange. Drawing inspiration from her own experience of immigrating to the United States from El Salvador, she incorporates indigenous elements such as plants and stones from the Americas into her sculptures to highlight the parallels between the migration of people and plants. In her public installations, she includes weather and other atmospheric conditions to encourage viewers to consider the vast time spans marked by the planet's movements, the presence of non-human worlds with different timeframes all around us, and the ways in which materials are affected by their location and interactions with the environment. Her most popular work, Tzolk’in (2018), is a large-scale mechanical sculpture that incorporates elements of Mayan cosmology and technology. The machine is inspired by the ancient Maya calendar that was used for agriculture, and its gears move in a way that combines circular and linear motion. Her work imagines a new kind of space that brings together different histories and cultures, acknowledging global and cosmic nomadism and envisioning the potential for divergent entities to coexist.
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Commonwealth and Council is a gallery in Koreatown, Los Angeles founded in 2010. Our program is rooted in our commitment to explore how a community of artists can sustain our co-existence through generosity and hospitality. Commonwealth and Council celebrates our manifold identities and experiences through the shared dialogue of art—championing practices by women, queer, POC, and our ally artists to build counter-histories that reflect our individual and collective realities. ...
