Guillermo Galindo: Tortoise: messages, variations, interpretations
Tortoise is a solo exhibition of new work by Mexican-American composer, visual artist, and experimental musician Guillermo Galindo. The exhibition continues Galindo’s exploration of borders – metaphysical, geographic, political, philosophical, ecological, and beyond. His broad conceptual focus employs an expansive interpretation of what constitutes a border, whether it be a liminal realm between dreams and consciousness or the differentiation of sound and vision.
Tortoise will feature a series of paintings of tortoise shells collected by the artist during his yearlong residency at Roswell, New Mexico, and a selection of double exposure photographic prints with graphic interventions.
Tortoise is anchored by Galindo’s investigation of tortoises as symbols of migration, intuition, longevity, and wisdom, contextualized by his longstanding interest in border constructs. Fascinated by the tortoise’s unique capacity to navigate between land and water and to reorient to its birthplace, Galindo views the tortoise as a type of universal clock through which events are eternally synchronized. Tortoises exemplify Carl Jung’s theory of transcendent function, in which the psyche is able to reconcile forces of opposition between the unconscious and conscious realms. The confluence of physical memory, as in the tortoise’s ability to use the Earth’s magnetic field as a geolocator, and temporal memory, as in the natural grooved patterns of the tortoise’s lower shell (the “plastron”), can be felt in Galindo’s paintings of tortoise shells. Both Galindo’s paintings and the double-exposure photographs refer to the two tortoise shells that he found in the desert of New Mexico as a Roswell-artist-in-residence.
Galindo’s work references the tortoise’s many meanings as a recurring archetype across cultures and time periods. For example, Galindo was inspired by the Shang Dynasty-era practice of “plastromancy,” a form of divination using turtle shells that was practiced in ancient China. In the “scutes” – the individual growth plates on the plastron that can be used to calculate the tortoise’s age, similar to a tree ring – Galindo has interpreted and decoded a portrait of the sentient entity within the shell, giving it visibility in his paintings. The natural seams and patterns of the shell are akin to the symbols of music notation in Galindo’s practice: signifiers of meaning within systems of visual iconography.
