Armando Guadalupe Cortés

Field Resident, Feb 5, - Mar 26, 2023

Artist Statement

My practice builds on storytelling, object making, and performance traditions. I merge traditional forms and methods from my native México with broader Latin American literary traditions, and contrasts and hybridizes them with elements of my life in the United States. In my work--ranging from small-scale sculpture to sculpture-based endurance performance—I interweave influences from my life in a metropolis and a rural farming society. Endurance and repetitive labor are central in my work. They reflect an affinity for the traditional work of my family and the labor of immigrants in this country. These modes of labor parallel and intersect with my own work as an artist. My sculpture work is inspired by oral history, observation, and personal experience. My performances are often a literal walk in another’s shoes, a relating of the everyday struggle in my various worlds. Through my work I propel and make believable narratives often overlooked. This propagation of story takes the form of myth building. This myth-making challenges notions of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, I seek to upend the idea of myth and lore as fiction.

ARMANDO’S PROJECT

During my time at the Field Residency I intend to work on a series of pieces that have been in the experimentation stages and are now ready to be their own body of works. They are screens/window panels of ranging sizes that will be composed of natural obsidian, alabaster, flint, and other stones. They will be soldered together and resemble something like an abstracted stained-glass window. These will together create a broken narrative comprised of imagery from personal and historical anecdote.

Artist Biography

Armando Guadalupe Cortés is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Raised in the industrial town of Wilmington, CA but originally from Urequío, a small farming community in Michoacán, México, Cortés draws inspiration from every aspect of his vastly different worlds.⁠ Cortés’ practice builds on storytelling, object making, and performance traditions. He merges traditional forms and methods from his native México with broader Latin American literary traditions, and contrasts and hybridizes them with elements of his life in the United States.