Performance: Dead Parrot Radio

Smack Mellon presents a performance by Armando Guadalupe Cortés activating his installation and utilizing sculptures and objects from on view in the main gallery space. Running approximately 30 minutes, the performance will explore a series of anecdotes embedded in these objects, connected through geographical movement, animal-human interaction and dependency, and remembrance, when carried out from afar. The performance will take place on two Saturdays during the exhibition. 

Armando Guadalupe Cortés is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Originally from Urequío, a small farming community in Michoacán, México, Cortés draws inspiration from everyday aspects of his two vastly different worlds. His practice builds on storytelling, object making, and performance traditions. He merges traditional forms and methods from his native home with broader Latin American literary traditions, and contrasts and hybridizes them with elements of his life in the United States. 

In his work–ranging from small-scale sculpture to sculpture-based endurance performance–Cortés interweaves influences from his life in a metropolis and a rural farming society. Drawing from oral history, observation, and personal experience, Cortés explores and blends endurance, and labor into his performance, craft and industry into his sculpture, and history into his material choice.

Through his work Cortés strives to propel and make believable narratives often overlooked. This propagation of story takes the form of myth building. This myth-making challenges notions of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, Cortés seeks to upend the idea of myth and lore as fiction.