Today Opening Tuesday, April 5,6-8 PM
Traces and Tides of the Seaport (Part II)
Melville Gallery, of the South Street Seaport Museum
An exhibition featuring works of Filipe Cortez and curated by Adele Eisenstein.
on view through Saturday, April 9, daily 12-5pm
Within the framework of the Out To See festival, in its 3rd edition in 2016, worked on a palpable portrait of the South Street Seaport, in great part, with the kind collaboration of the South Street Seaport Museum. Traces and Tides of the Seaport, now extended at the beautiful Melville Gallery, courtesy of the South Street Seaport Museum, 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 – and were – the members of 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 phenomena 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 practice of site-specific installation tends to explore the memory of the architectural body. Each space has it own atmosphere, and it is from here that the installation/intervention is born, thus enhancing the memory and degradation of the space. Taking advantage of the history and the aesthetic of the architecture, Cortez dissects materials such as shaved dust, displays remnants of collected paint as well as suspended latex skins. This environment bears traces of aging and degradation of the architectural body, accentuating cracks, holes and imperfections. 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.
With thanks to the South Street Seaport Museum for making this additional week possible to view the show, now in the beautiful Melville Gallery, and to the Out To SeeFestival for supporting the commission of the work by Cortez, with production support from Little Water Radio, and the kind assistance of the Old Seaport Alliance, and the Howard Hughes Corporation.
https://southstreetseaportmuseum.org/events/traces-and-tides/
