When I used to visit my grandmother, I was terrified of the rosewood closet in her room that looked at me with its red eyes. This amused and pleased her for some reason even as she reassured me that these eyes were just knots in the wood. “You too,” she told me once, “have eyes all over your body like this wood.” Beatriz Cortez’s work asks us to use the eyes all over our bodies, to sense the world with all of our perceptual abilities from a multi-species perspective. Cortez activates these hidden senses in us by turning our attention to what is invisible and subterranean. In her artist project, The Underworld, Cortez repurposes optical and cartographic technologies by using the stereoscope, a 19th century optical device that was developed as a tool to aid people in imagining themselves in different locations in space and time. Historically, stereoscopic slides typically ranged from exotic, foreign locations most people did not have the ability to travel to—enabling a kind of virtual tourism—as well as serving an educational purpose of recording important past events such as the battlefields of the American Civil War or the so-called American Indian Wars. Technically, the stereoscopic device works by mimicking the parallax shift between our left and right eyes, creating an imagined dimensionality in the liminal realm of our mind’s interpretation. By bringing together images of what was once hidden from view below the earth’s crust—volcanic lava, sonar and laser mappings of ancient Mayan civilizations, and vast gardens of root vegetables growing amidst hills of lush flora and fauna, Cortez asks us to envision new ways of seeing and being. But her project is not one of discovery or excavation, but one that uses the spaces in between our eyes. With two stereoscopic slide images set side-by-side, or in her digital photos with ghostly images layered on top of each other, simultaneities connecting different landscapes or the same landscapes through different time periods become visible. We see the town that El Mozote could have been if the 1981 massacre had not occurred through an imagined digital fog of sonar haze that gives us the shadowy outlines of an ancient Mayan city full of ordinary citizens. We see the landscape of the Ixil region in Guatemala with its history of genocide, growing vibrant with crops for survival—roots that grew underground and could not be detected and destroyed like the cornfields the army burned. Through the slides in The Underworld, we get a glimpse of a world where past massacres and present forms of social death are reckoned with, addressed with care, and made visible; a posthuman place where migrant water hyacinths, people, and speculative hippos coexist.

–Candice Lin

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) has lived in the United States since 1989. She received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts, in 2015, and a PhD in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University, in 1999. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience  of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016); Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador (2014); and Museo Municipal Tecleño, El Salvador (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Chronos, Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space, at the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2019); Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, at the Queens Museum, New York (2019); The Autotopographers, at the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2019); Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine, at Ballroom Marfa, in Marfa, Texas (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador (2016); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016). Cortez has received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018) and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016).