People had beheld the heavens; they had seen how by day the sun illumined the sky and by night the moon, consistently, repeatedly. Seen, and then wondered, and then asked questions. How to name these lights of the day and the night? What is their meaning in relation to time and phases of the year? Who put them there? What was it like before the world was lit up by them, before day and night were separated, before time was subdivided? And then an answer comes to the asker.¹
Under the guise of this whole yet somehow delicate narrative, knowledge and history are carried along as part of the myth. Fractured truths are lodged deep within the fantasy, only to make us feel crazier than we already do.
Works are overly cared for, with perhaps oppressive tenderness; human hair and nails are displayed as relics, and what was stone now yields the thinnest veil. Salvaged objects and structures, once still, are transfigured by their mise en scène. Together these works are evocative traces of heirloom, oracle, and body itself. As memory is fleeting, a forgotten past is reminisced upon—a dramatic re-enactment that otherwise could not exist. “Knowledge wearing the mask of myth and myth disguised as knowledge are, so to speak, welcome figures in the masquerade of human thought.”²
Curated by Sam Branden, Raphaëlle Cormier, and Christine Rebhuhn.
1. Jolles, André. "Myth" in Simple Forms (1929), pp. 77–78.
2. Ibid., p. 88.
Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez was born in the US to parents from Argentina and Chile and currently lives/works between NYC and Buenos Aires. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA at Yale University. She is the recipient of the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship from Yale University, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Grant from Yale University, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in NYC, among others. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows in the US, Latin America, and Europe, and has curated exhibitions at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center in NYC and the Eduardo Sívori Museum in Buenos Aires, bringing together artists from both cities. She has participated in various residencies such as LMCC Swing Space, Mass MoCA, Real Time and Space, and the NARS Foundation, among others. She is co-founder of the platform LAZO, a resource and archive for contemporary artists of Latin American descent. Claudia is currently participating in the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency.
Cindy Hill is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work focuses primarily on the relationship between design aesthetics and perceptions of the body. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. She has also studied at the University of South Australia in Adelaide (Australia) and completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada). She was recently an artist-in-residence at the London Summer Intensive hosted by the Camden Arts Center and the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in London (UK). Her work has been exhibited in different spaces in Montreal, among others: Calaboose and Lois Projects. She currently lives and works in Montreal (Canada).
