Z’otz* Collective: Bartering Futures

Eastern Edge Gallery, Sept. 13 – Oct. 26, 2024

Reviewed by Rhea Rollman

There is a line connecting me, connecting you. It’s not always visible, but it is there. Your eyes reading my text. The radio waves of your wifi device intermingling with mine. On social media these connections can be likes and content shares, mutual friends, video views and myriad other forms of (formless) interaction. Silent lines connect us in our physical communities too. We are constantly walking through the sightlines of strangers, shadows observed in passing through neighbours’ windows, our pets mingling their scents on our lawns, video cameras tracking us, cellphones autolocating. The invisible networks binding us to each other and our communities are as light and tenacious and infrangible as spider silk. Rarely do we see these networks, and certainly not in colour, nor rendered as fantastically as in the Z’otz* Collective’s Bartering Futures exhibition at Eastern Edge.

Z’otz* Collective – Nahúm Flores, Erik Jerezano, Ilyana Martínez – are based in Toronto. They’ve been working together for twenty years, meeting weekly in collaborative group sessions. Their Eastern Edge exhibit epitomizes this collaborative style. Produced over the course of five days, the mural they’ve drawn on the gallery walls circles the room: an undulating, unbroken sequence of phantasmagoric line drawings in bright, colourful charcoal pastels. The mural is fixed in space, inscribed on the walls, but this fixity is deceptive. It writhes as though alive, images shifting and morphing in the viewer’s mind as the brain struggles to discern comprehensible figures and understand what it is seeing. Is this image a human face, or a bird? A tree, or a body? Is it animal? Human? Angel or monster?

Offset niches punctuate the space. Incorporated into the flow, they nevertheless stand out as distinct and contain local ephemera collected by the artists upon their arrival here: a rock, a feather, dried flowers. How to understand these niches? As opportunities to zoom in on insets of the larger work? Yet there is something sad and lonely about the objects contained; the niches like tombs, their contents fixed and isolated while the colourful undulating lines flow around them. The local is incorporated in other ways into the piece: a boat, sea creatures, and other stylized objects drawn on the walls hearken to the broader lived environment in which this original, place-based exhibit was produced. These elements engage with more abstract and symbolic images, some of which recur throughout the Collective’s two-decade oeuvre. The overall style gives Heavy Metal animation meeting ancient Mesoamerican codices.

The work reminds us of our ties to each other, and the fact that despite what we may think we are never truly fixed in form or substance. We exist in constant states of transition: both in ourselves, and in our relationships with others. At a higher level this process is echoed in forms of cultural hybridity, societies themselves mingling, flowing together and exchanging parts in processes that are sometimes joyful, sometimes violent.

Rounding out the exhibition is a series of individual framed drawings, and a mesmerizing video animation of a Z’otz fantasy brought to life and looped. The viewer can only imagine what it would have been like to witness the large mural being produced: artists shifting position around each other and building on each other’s work as the single gallery-sized flow took form. But one catches a glimpse at a parallel process through the animation.

You have just a few weeks to experience this beautiful, thought-provoking, mesmerizing exhibit before it’s painted over. There’s something both tragic and exciting about this inevitability, which aptly mirrors the ephemerality of our own existence in this place. If change and transformation is a constant, then even the mural’s final dissolution is merely another transformation; its imprint forever absorbed into the gallery walls, a silent and eternal influence flowing hand in hand with whatever comes next.

Invisible lines connecting me, connecting you, connecting those yet to come.