William Cordova “Smoke Signals: Sculpting In Time”

Sikkema, Jenkins & Co

This event has ended.

The smoke signal is one of the oldest forms of communication in recorded history. It is a form of visual communication used over long distances.
-Susan Lobo (Native American Voices, 3rd Edition)

In general smoke signals are used to transmit news, signal danger, or gather people to a common area.
-Shirley Lee (Text-Tionary: The Ultimate Decoder of Text Abbreviations)

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents smoke signals: sculpting in time, William Cordova’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. For this exhibition Cordova has produced an installation that focus on the intersection and synthesis of architecture, cultures, and spirituality.

Cordova combines research, travel, writing, drawing, photography, and sculpture to create artworks that disrupt assumptions of a linear history. This idea takes physical shape in the form of the large-scale spiral wooden scaffolding structure which fills the main gallery space. smoke signals: sculpting in time is an expansion on Cordova’s site-specific installation originally commissioned for the SITElines.2016 Much Wider Than a Line, presented by SITE Santa Fe and co-curated by Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Pip Day, Pablo León de la Barra, and Kiki Mazzucchelli. According to Cordova, the structure links architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller transcendental philosophies with Aztec, Andean, and Asian architecture as a way of reconnecting ancient geometric principals and pragmatic use of materials.

Included in the installation are a series of large scale collages, a set of drawings, suite of unique Polaroid prints, video, custom audio LP, and several small sculptures. Examples of these works include fin, pero no es el fin (follow the drinking gourd), 2016, a suite of 6 framed Peruvian cacao drawings – an amalgamation of cosmological maps and fragments of architectural design relating to Frank Lloyd Wright’s custom window design, as well as Japanese, and Tiwanaku design from which Wright drew influence. physical graffiti (or the synthesis we knew about), 2016, is a vinyl recording of an ant hill located within the exterior walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago and a similar ant hill in the exterior of the now demolished People’s Church, also in Chicago, which was once the Young Lords activist organization headquarters (1969-1970). The work links eusocial and socialist architectural strategies through audio as a form of resonating shared rituals in the spirit of Bill Viola’s transcendental empty pool recordings on The Talking Drum (1979) LP and the late Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson’s Ants (1960) composition.

William Cordova was born in Lima, Peru in 1971 and moved to Miami, Florida at an early age, also spending time in Houston, Chicago, and New York. He graduated with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Core program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Woodstock Center for Photography, NY, The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine; and American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

Recent solo exhibitions of Codova’s work include ceiba: reconsidering ephemeral spaces at Davidson College, Davidson, NC (2016); yawar mallku: metaphysics of time and space at 80M2, Lima, Peru (2015); and swing/SPACE/miami: william cordova – ceiba: reconsidering ephemeral spaces at MDC, Museum of Art + Design at Miami Dade College, Miami, FL (2014). His work is included in collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale Art Gallery, New Haven; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; Ellipse Foundation, Cascais, Portugal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and La Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba; among others.