Anna Ortiz 'The Tattooed Noon and Naked Midnight'

About

Deanna Evans Projects is pleased to present The Tattooed Noon and Naked Midnight, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Anna Ortiz. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view from January 12 - February 16, 2024.

The Tattooed Noon and Naked Midnight is an excerpt from Octavio Paz’s prose-poem “Obsidian Butterfly.” Written in the voice of the Aztec goddess, Itzpapalotl who is characterized as a butterfly of death, the goddess laments her lost potency since the invasion of the Spaniards. In this new reality Itzpapalotl, once the creator of man, an all powerful source of life and death, has been rendered irrelevant. The goddess revels in the memory of her previous life, newly aware of this sudden loss. Finding her powers diminished she wishes to be turned from dust to seed, to regrow as a new life force. 

Throughout the poem, life and death are turned over each other, intertwined and inextricably linked. The end of Itzpapalotl's reign signifies the beginning of a new chapter in Mexican history. Similarly, the paintings in Anna Ortiz’s solo show, The Tattooed Noon and Naked Midnight, revolve around ideas about the cycle of life and death on both a human and universal scale. Having lost her father during the summer of 2023, this show is a meditation on loss, the brevity of life, and the afterlife. In Ortiz's world, no death is a final act, just another step in the ever churning cosmic exchange of matter. 

Working within the surreal landscape that has come to define her work, Ortiz creates imagery that embraces the duality of her identity as a Mexican-American. Within these landscapes are reimagined mesoamerican sculptures that exist somewhere between living and dead, both animate and inanimate. The sculptures hold a space for reflection in a world between worlds. While being an homage to the heritage her father adored, these figures also serve as offerings to the viewers. Similarly, the botanicals, cacti, agave and other desert plants exist in a space between spaces, they seem to communicate with the heavens; leaves, branches, and arms reaching skyward. Sculptures and botanicals alike, all made from the same star dust, reach beyond their earthly dwellings and into space seeking connection. 

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Anna Ortiz is a Mexican-American painter living in Brooklyn. Ortiz has had solo exhibitions at Dinner Gallery and Proto Gomez in New York. She has shown with Monya Rowe Gallery, Huxley-Parlour and My Pet Ram. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Artsy, Make Magazine and Art Maaze. She has also been interviewed on the Sound and Vision Podcast. She has a forthcoming residency at the Golden Foundation in the fall of 2024.

Obsidian Butterfly by Octavio Paz (translated by Eliot Weinberger)

They killed my brothers, my children, my uncles.  On the banks of Lake Texcoco I began to weep.  Whirlwinds of salt-peter rose from Peñon hill, gently picked me up, and left me in the courtyard of the Cathedral.  I made myself so small and gray that many mistook me for a pile of dust.  Yes I, mother of flint and star, bearer of the ray, am now but a blue feather that a bird loses in the brambles.  Once, I would dance, my breasts high and turning, turning, turning until I became still, and then I would sprout leaves, flowers, fruit.  The eagle throbbed in my belly.  I was the mountain that creates you as it dreams, the house of fire, the primordial pot where man is cooked and becomes man.  In the night of the decapitated words my sister and I, hand in hand, leapt and sang around the I, the only standing tower in the razed alphabet.  I still remember my songs:

       Light, headless light
      Golden-throated light
      Sings in the thicket green

They told us: the straight path never leads to winter. And now my hands tremble, the words are caught in my throat.  Give me a chair and a little sun.

In other times, every hour was born from the vapor of my breath, danced a while on the point of my dagger, and disappeared through the shining door of my hand mirror.  I was the tattooed noon and naked midnight, the little jade insect that sings in the grass at dawn, and the clay nightingale that summons the dead.  I bathed in the sun’s waterfall, I bathed in myself, soaked in my own splendor.  I was the flint that rips the storm clouds of night and opens the doors of the showers.  I planted gardens of fire, gardens of blood, in the Southern sky.  Its coral branches still graze the foreheads of lovers.  There, love is the meeting of two meteors in the middle of space, and not this obstinacy of rocks rubbing each other to ignite a sparking kiss.

Each night is an eyelid the thorns never stop piercing. And the day never ends, never stops counting itself, broken into copper coins.  I am tired of so many stone beads scattered in the dust.  I am tired of this unfinished solitaire. Lucky the mother scorpion who devours her young. Lucky the spider. Lucky the snake that sheds its skin. Lucky the water that drinks itself.  When will these images stop devouring me? When will I stop falling in those empty eyes?  

I am alone and fallen, grain of corn pulled from the ear of time. Sow me among the battle dead. I will be born in the captain’s eye. Rain down on me, give me sun. My body, plowed by your body, will turn into a field where one is sown and a hundred reaped. Wait for me on the other side of the year: you will meet me like a lightning flash stretched to the edge of autumn.  Touch my grass breasts.  Kiss my belly, sacrificial stone. In my navel the whirlwind grows calm: I am the fixed center that moves the dance. Burn, fall into me: I am the pit of living lime that cures the bones of their afflictions. Die in my lips. Rise from my eyes.  Images gush from my body: drink in these waters and remember what you forgot at birth.  I am the wound that does not heal, the small solar stone: if you strike me, the world will go up in flames.

Take my necklace of tears. I wait for you on this side of time where light has inaugurated a joyous reign: the covenant of the enemy twins, water, that escapes between our fingers, and ice, petrified like a king in his pride. There you will open my body to read the inscription of your fate.

Mariposa de obsidiana by Octavio Paz

Mataron a mis hermanos, a mis hijos, a mis tios. A la orilla del lago Texcoco me eche a llorar. Del Penon subian remolinos de salitre. Me cogieron suavemente y me depositaron en el atrio de la Catedral. Me hice tan pequena y tan gris que muchos me confundieron con un montoncito de polvo. Si, yo misma, la madre del pedernal y de la estrella, yo, encinta del rayo, soy ahora la pluma azul que abandona el pajaro en la zarza. Bailaba, los pechos en alto y girando, girando, girando hasta quedarme quieta; entonces empezaba a echar hojas, flores, frutos. En mi vientre latia el aguila. Yo era la montana que engendra cuando suena, la casa del fuego, la olla primordial donde el hombre se cuece y se hace hombre. En la noche de las palabras
degolladas mis hermanas y yo, cogidas de la mano, saltamos y cantamos alrededor de la I, unica torre en pie del alfabeto arrasado. Aun recuerdo mis canciones:

Canta en la verde espesura
  la luz de garganta dorada,
la luz, la luz decapitada.

Nos dijeron: la vereda derecha nunca conduce al invierno. Y ahora las manos me tiemblan, las palabras me cuelgan de la boca. Dame una sillita y un poco de sol.

En otros tiempos cada hora nacia de vaho de mi aliento, bailaba un instante sobre la punta de mi punal y desaparecia por la puerta resplandeciente de mi espejito. Y yo era el mediodia tatuado y la noche desnuda, el pequeno insecto de jade que canta entre las yerbas del amanecer y el zenzontle de barro que convoca a los muertos. Me banaba en la cascada solar, me banaba en mi misma, anegada en mi propio resplandor. Yo era el pedernal que rasga la cerrazon nocturna y abre las puertas del chubasco. En el cielo del Sur plante jardines de fuego, jardines de sangre. Sus ramas de coral todavia rozan la frente de los
enamorados. Alla el amor es el encuentro en mitad del espacio de dos aerolitos y no esa obstinacion de piedras frotandose para arrancarse un beso que chisporrea.

Cada noche es un parpado que no acaban de atravesar las espinas. Y el dia no acaba nunca, no acaba nunca de contarse a si mismo, roto de monedas de cobre. Estoy cansada de tantas cuentas de piedra desparramadas en el polvo. Estoy cansada de este solitario tronco. Dichoso el alacran madre, que devora a sus hijos. Dichosa la arana. ¿Dichosa la serpiente, que muda de camisa. Dichosa el agua que se bebe a si misma.? ¿Cuando acabaran de devorarme estas imagenes? ¿Cuando acabare de caer en esos ojos desiertos?

Estoy sola y caida, grano de maiz desprendido de la mazorca del tiempo. Siembrame entre los fusilados. Nacere del ojo del capitan. Llueveme, asoleame. Mi cuerpo arado por el tuyo ha de volverse un campo donde se siembra uno y se cosechan ciento. Esperame al otro lado del ano: me encontraras como un relampago tendido a la orilla del otono. Toca mis pechos de yerba. Besa mi vientre, piedra de sacrificios. En mi ombligo el remolino se aquieta: yo soy el centro fijo que mueve la danza. Arde, cae en mi: soy la fosa de cal viva que cura los huesos de su pesadumbre. Muere en mis labios. Nace en mis ojos. De mi cuerpo brotan imagenes: bebe en esas aguas y recuerda lo que olvidaste al nacer. Soy la herida que no cicatriza, la pequena piedra solar: si me rozas, el mundo se incendia.

Toma mi collar de lagrimas. Te espero en ese lado del tiempo en
donde la luz inaugura un reinado dichoso: el pacto de los gemelos enemigos, del agua que escapa entre los dedos de hielo, petrificado como un rey en su orgullo. Alli abriras mi cuerpo en dos, para leer las letras de tu destino.