For Art Basel Miami Beach 2021, Commonwealth and Council presents new works by Beatriz  Cortez, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, and Julie Tolentino. Each artist inscribes the ineffable  vestiges of loss, perseverence, and joy wrought by histories of migration, survival, and queer  existence. They mine these sites: of displacement and farewells, and of the possibility of  encounter with new possible lives, creating memorials indexing oft-overlooked memories and  materials of the land—soil, plants, human detritus, and our own ephemeral bodies. A trilling  tree trunk, a shape-shifting assembly of mirror-faceted cubes, a rock that holds breath. In  their midst, we encounter glimmers of solidarity across the realms of plant and animal, living  and dead. 

Plants, like humans, are networked beings—roots circulate resources and information in  imperceptible, underground chatter. Salvadoran artist Beatriz Cortez upends this invisibility  with steel reimaginations of root systems, inverted to resemble a brain stem or nervous  system. Crowned with a tangle of grey matter, these sculptures posit Indigenous knowledge  as not trod-upon foundation but vital and active components of knowledge and survival. After  all, plants fundamentally enable all terrestrial life. Perhaps these plants continue to circulate  the wisdom of those who preceded us through the mediums of soil and air. Roots function as  plants’ main way of communication, both internally and with other plants. The breath that we  inhale carries missives from the plant and all its interconnected brethren. The Breathing  Stone, a patinated steel boulder, holds Mayan glyphs whose aggregated meaning reads “The  stone that manifests breathing for the people”—a tribute to human and non-human  persistence, and to the unseen but no less crucial processes that facilitate life.  

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio positions trees as witnesses and actors within an intimate portrait of  Central American diaspora. Aparicio has taken skin-like rubber casts from trees in the Pico Union and Westlake neighborhoods of Los Angeles, home to a large Central American  immigrant population. Backed with clothing found in those same neighborhoods and limned  with glass shards in an ad-hoc gesture of protection, this patchworked and flayed body  resembles that of the emigré community itself—taken apart, reconstituted. These trees (many  of which have been cut down or removed) act as markers of incident, holding in their  surfaces markings from graffiti, carvings, and pollution—just as Cortez’s unsealed steel, too,  will gradually assume the tarnish and imprints of the air and those with whom it comes in  contact. Many of the trees that Aparicio casts have been cut down, rendering his “skins”  tributes to a changing urban landscape and echoing the mass deforestation of El Salvador  during its civil war. The work posits trees as disappeared bodies, and as indices of and  subjects to change. 

A mirrored glass cube splits apart into units: glittering metonyms; blood red and black  abrasions stain their surfaces. Julie Tolentino takes a smoldering slurry of acid and a razor  blade to the mirror glass, coaxing it to reveal the initials of those loved and lost. Each  chemical wash is a testament of remembrance, conjuring the bodies and spirits taken by  racialized violence and stigmatized illness.

Spilling from their aggregated cube in ever-changing configurations, the confluence of  mirrored boxes creates kaleidoscopic feedback loops of edges and vertices, recalling the  mobility of grief. Karen Barad writes that “loss is not absence but a marked presence, or  rather a marking that troubles the divide between absence and presence.” The haunts,  ghosting across the mirror, separate us from the familiarity of our reflections in a silent  intercession. The marred reflections resist the mirror’s seduction, its compulsion to merely  echo its surroundings; rather it tampers with material reality to reveal a world shot through  with loss, with the viewer as a sole, and forever-marked, survivor. 

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles)  received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a Ph.D. in Literature and  Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. Cortez’s work explores simultaneity, life in  different temporalities, and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to  memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation  to imagining possible futures. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at ICA San Diego,  CA (2021); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2019); Occidental College, Los Angeles  (2019); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2016);  and Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016). Cortez has participated in group  exhibitions at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA (2021, 2016); 18th Street Arts  Center, Santa Monica, CA (2020); the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Ballroom Marfa,  TX (2019); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2019); John Michael Kohler Arts Center,  Sheboygan, WI (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Whitney Museum of  American Art, New York (2017); and Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador  (2016). Cortez is the recipient of the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), the inaugural  Frieze LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019), the Emergency Grant from the Foundation of  Contemporary Arts (2019), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018),  the Artist Community Engagement Grant (2017), and the California Community  Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016). Her work is currently included in  FUTURES at the Smithsonian Arts + Industry Building. 

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (b. 1990, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles)  received an MFA from Yale University in 2016 and BA in Studio Art from Bard College in  2012, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Recent solo  exhibitions have been held at Los Angeles State Historic Park, Clockshop, CA (2021);  Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2020); Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019);  The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2018); and Green Gallery, New Haven, CT (2016).  Aparicio has participated in group exhibitions at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); El  Museo del Barrio, New York (2021); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville,  AR (2020); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA (2019); Anonymous Gallery,  Mexico City (2018); Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2018); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2017);  and Abrons Art Center, New York (2016). He is the recipient of the California Community  Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2018); Schell Center for Human Rights  Fellowship, Yale University (2015); National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, VCCA  (2014); and Sol LeWitt and Elizabeth Murray Studio Arts Award, Bard College (2012).

Julie Tolentino (b. 1964, San Francisco; lives and works in Joshua Tree) is a Filipina Salvadoran artist whose practice explores durational performance, movement, and  sensual practices within installation environments as a way to explore the interstitial  spaces of relationality, memory, race, gender, and the archive. Tolentino received their  MFA from University of California Riverside in 2020, where they were a Dean's  Distinguished Fellow in Experimental Choreography. Recent performances and  exhibitions have been held at Aspen Art Museum, CO (2020); Leslie Lohman Museum  of Art, NY (2020); Performance Space New York, NY (2019); Commonwealth and  Council (2019); Participant Inc, New York (2019, 2005); The Kitchen, New York (2019);  EFA Project Space, New York (2019); 6th Annual Thessaloniki Biennale, Thessaloniki,  Greece (2018); and the Lab, San Francisco (2018). 

Tolentino led queer club spaces such as Clit Club, Tattooed Love Child, and Dagger at  various locations in New York City throughout the 1990’s and was a founding member  of ACTUP NY, Art Positive and House of Color Video Collective, and with Cynthia  Madansky, co-created the Safer Sex Handbook for Women for Lesbian AIDS Project/ GMHC. Selected awards and residencies include Anonymous Was a Woman Award  (2021), Herb Alpert/Ucross Residency (2021), MacDowell Residency (2020), Queer|Art| Prize for Sustained Achievement (2020), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant  To Artists award in Performance (2019), Fulcrum Arts Artist Honor (2019), Pieter  Performance Dancemakers Grant (2018), Boffo Fire Island Residency (2018), Hope  Mohr Dance Community Engagement Artist-In-Residence (2017-18), Yerba Buena  Center for the Arts Community Artist (2013-14), PACT Zollverein Residency, Essen,  Germany (2012), Art Matters Foundation Award (2015, 2010), CHIME Mentorship  awards with Doran George (2010) and with Jmy Kidd (2012). Tolentino will be the 2022  Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair of World Arts and Cultures at University of California Los  Angeles.