4Columns Reviews Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza's exhibition at Americas Society
4Columns Reviews Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza's exhibition at Americas Society
The art website describes the show as "a spectacular collision of land and tradition, borders and migration."
Earth and Cosmos, an exhibition of work by rafa esparza and Beatriz Cortez at the Americas Society, curated by the artists themselves, revolves around two cataclysms. The first is an asteroid’s collision with Earth sixty-six million years ago, leaving a two-hundred-kilometer-wide crater off the Yucatán Peninsula, near what is now the town of Chicxulub Pueblo.
The impact triggered an extinction-level event wherein 75 percent of life on the planet was wiped out, thanks to waves of earthquakes and clouds of dust and ejecta—space matter—that blanketed the planet in a thick layer of clay. The second was the eruption of the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador somewhere around the fifth or sixth century CE.
That explosion, known as the Tierra Blanca Joven, sent a volcanic plume fifty kilometers into the air, to the outer edge of the stratosphere. Around the world, ash obscured the sun, contributing to a climate shift; rivers of lava, coming from deep within the earth’s mantle, hardened into basalt stone when they reached the surface...
