Tzolk’in is a site specific sculpture by LA-based artist Beatriz Cortez at the Bowtie Project, produced by Clockshop.
As a steel replication of a “tzolk’in”, an ancient 260-day Mayan calendar, the artwork continues Cortez’s exploration of linear and circular understandings of time, the logic of labor, and experiences of immigration and simultaneity.
Tzolk’in is a project in two parts. Cortez has created a second sculpture for the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in LA biennial exhibition, on display from June 3 – September 2, 2018. Cortez intends that the sculptures’ contrasting locations, from a gallery setting to the post-industrial site of the Bowtie, can invite audiences to reflect on the intimate bond that might exist between remote realities.
Beatriz Cortez is an artist, a writer, and an educator. She was born in El Salvador and has lived in the United States since 1989. Her work explores simultaneity, the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of immigration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has exhibited her work nationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York, Minneapolis, and Miami, and internationally in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Ecuador. She holds an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She is professor of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. She lives and works in Los Angeles.