OFLUXO

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s work brings an incisive approach to the contents of everyday life, uncovering hidden histories and drawing discrete connections to reveal unseen structures of influence. Working in sculpture and installation, she creates an atmosphere of defamiliarization where materials, forms, and ideas slip into one another. A poultice of specific objects and beings, Ichthyocentaur distills history to illuminate our misbeliefs and reveal the arcane forces that have shaped “The New World.”

Throughout the exhibition, Bermúdez-Silverman culls contested narratives from her extensive research, particularly historical accounts of the European colonization of the Americas. Like an archeologist uncovering long-buried relics, she sifts through the annals of history to identify specific fallacies, blunders, and myths.

It is told that when the Spanish conquistadors first arrived in the Americas upon horseback, the indigenous people believed the two beings, man and horse, were one–centaurs, mythical descendents of the ancient Greek ichthyocentaur, another hybrid being that was believed to be part sea animal, part human, and part horse. The Eurocentric tale of this first encounter assigns the Spanish a god-like stature, with the Native Americans gazing up in awe at powerful beings– European men and their horses– beyond their recognition.

The accepted scientific narrative amongst American academics supports this narrative: forty million years ago, wild horses roamed North America, yet disappeared from the region during the last Ice Age, and were only later reintroduced by European conquistadors. This reintroduction of the horse, they say, was a determining force in the success of the European colonial project: “Next to God, we owed our victory to the horses,” proclaimed Hernan Cortes, who led the conquest of what is now Mexico.

Yet many scholars of the Global South dispute these axioms, asserting that horses never went extinct and that indigenous tribes used horses continuously and for millennia. Fantasy and myth are entangled with facts and history. Nevertheless, the Spanish did, in fact, resemble the ichthyocentaur when emerging from the Atlantic: men bound to horse by saddle, hailing from the sea.

In Paso Largo (2023), mythology becomes sublimated into a sea shell-shaped vessel containing a perfume handcrafted by the artist. Composed of notes from tobacco, seaweed, vanilla, and other cash crops indigenous to the Americas whose extraction fueled the colonial era, it offers a concise distillation of the lore embedded in Ichthyocentaur. Paso Largo, Paso Corto, á la brida and á la jineta (all 2023) each use translucent toddler-sized glass saddles to explore the alchemic ingredient in creating the mythic Spanish conquistadors.

The saddle is the result of an iterative process of re-making, a mixed breed of cultures of influence ranging from the Mexican vaqueros, Assyrians, Moors, Spanish, and American cowboys. Its iconic horn and other aspects were invented to better acclimate to ranch life and shepherding livestock, adaptations born of necessity and only after several rounds of trial and error. Aycayia (2023) offers an oversized counterpoint in carved wood. By presenting multiple