Traces and Tides of the Seaport curated by Adele Eisenstein and featuring the work of Filipe Cortez will open Tuesday, March 22nd, from 6-10 pm at the Out To See headquarters, 192 Front Street in the Seaport (next to the TKTS office).
The Out To See festival, in its 3rd edition in 2016, asks visitors to open their eyes and become aware of their surroundings, as they step over the cobblestones of the Seaport district, and to recognize what the area is made of, what it was constructed from, who are in the community.
Traces and Tides of the Seaport features the work of Filipe Cortez, who arrives from the far side of the Atlantic, in Portugal. Cortez’s multidisciplinary practice examines memory, time and decay. Physical decay relating to the human body and architecture is investigated, and their connections through in-situ performances in series such as “Contamination” (contaminated wall representations), “Skin Series” (where the residues of the architectural structure are taken from their original structure with latex membranes), or “Fossils”. Through an intensive examination conducted with microscopic intention, Cortez succeeds in extracting an aesthetic of beauty from degradation, decomposition and physical disease, through phenomema such as age marks, cracks, mold or humidity. As the human body ages, so do the spaces that it inhabits, as evidenced by multifold manifestations of the passing of time.
What better environment for the artist to work in than this teeming cradle of NYC, accumulating four centuries of history and layers of architectural structures and human cells.
Cortez’s creations form a ghostly presence, rendering traces from the past visible, palpable. As such, they represent the deposit of past lives, recalling our own mortality – and that of the generations who preceded us, and those yet to come.
