A jaguar stalks the edges of myth and movement in Anna Ortiz9s paintings, mirroring the Mesoamerican nagualdda shape-shifting guide crossing between realms. Drawing on her Mexican-American heritage, Ortiz renders remote, jungle-like landscapes with a tightly edited yet vivid palette. Subtle modulations of tone and saturation in blues, greens, and pinks pull the eye through terrains that feel at once lush and otherworldly, a place where the familiar slips into the fantastic.
Shapeshifter at Chart Gallery
With Shapeshifter, Ortiz extends her ongoing exploration of the borderlands and of what unfolds when time and space seem to collapse. Across the new body of work, recurring imagesdan explosive volcano, a double moon, and reflective pools of waterdcast the setting as an uncanny zone where multiple realities coexist and change is a constant. The concentrated color choices sharpen this sense of simultaneity, heightening the mythic charge in each scene.
Among the works presented are pieces titled La Fisura, Inundada, Jaguar Reflejado, Espejo Obsidiana, El Corredor, Floracion, Las Garzas, Equilibrium, and Un Eclipse en Doble. Together they sketch a mutable topography where reflective surfaces double skies and seismic forces roil below.
Echoes of Gloria Anzald fa40a
Ortizfs vision resonates with the writings of feminist author Gloria Anzald fa40a, whose thinking on mixed heritage, the borderland, and the nagual finds a visual analogue here. Anzald fa40afs 1992 essay The New Mestiza Nation offers a touchstone passage for the work: Certain aspects of identity donft disappear, arenft assimilated or repressed when they are not in the foreground. Identity is a changing cluster of components and a shape-shifting activity. To refer to a person who is changing identity I use the N e1huatl term nagual a We shift around to do the work we have to do, to creative the identities we need to live up to our potential.
Shapeshifter is on view through October 31 at Chart Gallery in Tribeca.
