william cordova: can’t stop, won’t stop (geometria sagrada)

Within the artistic ambit of genealogy construction, there are two dominant approaches: the historical-visual procession that, with almost no spindle-side interferences, runs through the undertow of causal history; and the more elliptical, schematic approach indicating seemingly comparable visual idioms that, though historically, geographically, and culturally disparate, are brought into conjunction. This latter approach, often beginning from a point of incidental convergence, is more demanding on behalf of the interpreter who seeks to secure meaning from what might very well just be a tendentious telling of historical contingencies. From this tradition, cultural practitioner william cordova emerges. In can’t stop, won’t stop (geometria sagrada), an exhibition replete with found-object sculptures, collages, and a looming scaffolding fitted with clamp-suspended paintings, cordova’s referential semblance is myriad and esoteric. Subaltern historical figures are interwoven with cosmological deities, political revolutionaries and testaments to kindred art world personalities. Hailing from Lima, Peru by way of Miami, and having undertaken lengthy cultural history research projects over the last four decades, cordova also reflects on his personal history in this body of work.

Critics like Lori Waxman have correctly deterred purely aesthetic approaches when engaging cordova’s work, arguing that “the real interest of Cordova's [sic] installation resides less in how deftly he arranges candy-bar wrappers, reclaimed bricks, and old book covers than in how shrewdly he makes them do symbolic work that, frustratingly, can't fully be grasped.” Yet the claim that cordova’s work is impregnable is misleading. While his works readily allow for variable and competing interpretations—which very well might be interminable—there are clear signifiers that can be researched and comprehended. Afterwards, the interpreter must take into account the full nexus. cordova’s penchant for stepping over and tattering his paper collages, physically distressing his pedestals, and scratching his sculptures is an indication that he is fully aware that the displayed references have been disenfranchised by the dominant telling of history.

Admittedly, works like untitled (alma en hielo) (2024), an aerosol can suspended in a block of resin, and cumanana (transfisica de un cajon) (2024), a “cajon” drum suffuse with shea butter and a dreadlock-cum-antenna, are visually pleasing. The aesthetic approach, tempting though it is, is best sidelined. The meaning is bequeathed by the presentation of a mereological whole. In untitled (alma en hielo), the title is revealing: the “soul” (alma), symbolized by an instrument for graffiti-writing, is preserved in the resin, a stand-in for “ice” (hielo). One of the more straightforward works, the piece immortalizes a disposable urban artifact like a fossil, ritualizing an urban art practice. In a similarly preservationist spirit, cumanana (transfisica de un cajon) culls the Black street merchants who line neighborhoods like Harlem’s 125th Street, selling shea butter, incense, and other remedies, adjoining congeries of drummers’ circles prattling nearby.

The main installation in the show, can’t stop, won’t stop (rumimaki-krsoneogun) (2024), is a checkered quilt of recycled paint chips out of which an arachnean matrix of wooden beams emerges. Individual artworks are clamped to the beams. One such work honors the late Brent Sikkema, who passed away shortly before the exhibition, and another Michael Richards, an artist friend of cordova’s who passed away in 2001. Richards’s 1999 sculpture, Tar Baby vs. Sr. Sebastian is here syncretized with Oshosi, a divine Yoruba spirit. Other pieces invoke the mythological Andean spirit, Ukuku, the 1780 Battle of Sangarará, and the Black Panthers’ Community Information Center in High Point, North Carolina. The fruits wrought from such syncretic referential weavings may strike the viewer as arbitrary but, while cordova’s references are certainly idiosyncratic, the artist’s broader project is endowed with significance. Equal parts self-ethnography and deep research, cordova embraces mysticism and deters linearity. The numinous quality of his work is less anchored to cordova’s referents than in the connections between them. His mode of cultural foraging results in mausoleums rich with subterranean symbols that demand viewers engage in researching his references before interpreting their connections.

To merely relegate the connections between these nodes as similarly non-hegemonic sites is to wave away the more fundamental meaning behind cordova’s intricate network of confluence. cordova’s work has to do with the collapse of historical remembering in its very possibility. In turn, the meaning to be found in cordova’s work is less about the specific references than it is a meta-commentary on how such references can even possibly be interpreted in an epochal history that has barred their possible signification. That access to these references’ integrated meaning is proscribed by our viewership’s epochal and cultural situatedness is the very meaning. By putting these culturally-specific lost signifiers into a unified sphere, he sees to it that a synthesized logic is foreclosed. When he makes use of personal and contemporary imagery, cordova similarly illuminates the possibility that these local referents, too, will one day change in interpretability. In excavating these sites and references, positing them into an assemblage, cordova shows that the sole connective meaning can subsist as numinous.