CHART presents Anna Ortiz: Shapeshifter, paintings that take the form of landscapes while constructing a fictitious world shaped by ancient mythology and personal history. Drawing from Mexican-American heritage and Mesoamerican cosmology, the works inhabit a mutable borderland of passage and wonder. Recurring elements — volcanic landscapes, reflective water, indigenous plant life, and mythological figures — animate a world built through a restricted palette of subtle value and temperature shifts. Central is the jaguar, a shapeshifting nahual whose perspective Ortiz adopts as an elastic point of view, placing the viewer inside a terrain where history, mythology, and the present converge.
