Evicted from the anthill

Opening : Saturday August 19, 2017 at 4pm

Working together since 2004, the members of the Z’otz* Collective collaboratively catalogue the fantastical hybrid fauna that inhabits their shared dreamscape. Their cooperative drawings depict a wide range of often-coalescing creatures. The limbs of mammalian quadrupeds fluidly converge with clawed birds’ feet, tree trunks or even a naked human foot. When built structures appear, they are almost always smaller than most of the living organisms on display, as if to suggest moving into urban environments requires a shrinking of the physical self—or simply to suggest that cities and towns are themselves outgrowths of the body, extensions of ourselves.

The cooperative process embraced by the Z’otz* members – Nahum Flores, Erik Jerezano, and Ilyana Martinez – can itself be likened to the composite beasts they so seamlessly illustrate. As playfully described by Mark Laliberte in his catalogue text for a past Z’otz* exhibition, “[an] amorphous, unbounded, six-armed being manifests in their studio as they play-and-work as one, like the spirit of an old god invoked.”

If the elaborate creatures populating the world of Z’otz* are the result of playful work, they are not necessarily jubilant or joyful themselves. Rather, their postures speak to a kind of silent resilience or sustained reaching. Many of the larger bodies are in positions of disequilibrium, limbs outstretched to connect with their own disparate parts.

Through their work, Z’otz* make visible the wondrously convoluted and mystifying relationships that bind all living organisms together.