William Cordova’s work is tied to an urban ecology of obsolescence, disparity, and displacement. Busted cars, trashed tires, discarded shoes, machetes, speakers and books yellowed with age provide the material support and iconographic program for his drawings, collages, and installations. For the artist, these material choices reference the reality of lived experience, as opposed to the spectacle of culture, mass-produced for constant consumption. The fluency with which Cordova traverses media and remixes cultural signifiers confirms his visual multilinguism, as barbed as it is lived-in. Much of Cordova’s work induces similarly uncanny interpretive spirals, abetted not by arbitrary Surrealist juxtapositions but the all-too-common strangeness of our own detritus and the too-often repressed histories they conceal.

About the Artist:

William Cordova has earned his MFA from Yale University in 2004 and his BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. In addition to staging solo exhibitions e.g. at the Fleming Museum, University of Vermont (2009), the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2005/06), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2003), he has recently taken part in groundbreaking group exhibitions, such as „NeoHooDoo“, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas (2008), and „Street Level“, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2007). His works were presented in the San Juan Triennial, San Juan (2009), the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008), and the Biennale di Venezia (2003). In 2008 he was artist-inresidence at Artpace, San Antonio, Texas. In 2006 Arndt & Partner Berlin presented the first solo show of William Cordova in Germany.

Image: © William Cordova, ARDNT Berlin