Benjamin Krier

Miguel Cortez is a friendly guy. In talking about the biannual Polvo magazine he publishes, I asked him how he managed the citywide distribution of an independent, alternative arts periodical. He chuckled a little and answered: "by car." It's just a matter of commitment, he said.

Cortez is also committed to curating shows for the Polvo art space, which doubles as his home, bringing artists from around the world to display their work in the Pilsen neighborhood, working full-time as a graphic designer, managing three Web sites and three blogs, creating posters and stickers aimed at making the world a better place, publishing a magazine, using whatever tools high-tech and low to create art that attempts to connect the dots between distances both ephemeral and immediate. He is committed to the movements and signals of life, whether watching from an airplane window or walking past a frozen puddle on his way to work.

Miguel uses his airplane-visions and walk-to-work discoveries to lead viewers towards an appreciation of passing beauties, the snowflake divinity of everyday paths and routines. His painting series "Aerial Landscape" creates a sort of floor plan for a dream world where squares that could be living space lead to patches of orange and disappear into thin lines of smoke that might be rivers, all floating in a haze of green that could pass for either land or sky. His collection of digital prints on canvas entitled "Read My Palm" invites viewers to see the future from his own hand. He is reaching-out towards our inner-cartographer, the global-temporal-positioning-system hardwired in the collective "us."

Miguel Cortez will be showing work with Polvo at the Milwaukee International art fair in October and at the Mighty Fine Arts gallery in Dallas, Texas in 2007. Information on the Polvo Arts Collective can be found at www.polvo.org.

(2006-09-26)

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