Anna Ortiz Paints Shifting Borderlands Through Myth, Landscape and Memory
Anna Ortiz builds landscapes that feel suspended between physical geography and remembered myth. In her recent paintings, deserts, jungles, volcanoes and reflective pools are not simply settings. They become unstable territories where cultural memory, identity and transformation can occupy the same space.
Landscape as a Borderland
Ortiz draws on her Mexican-American heritage to construct places that are recognizable without behaving like conventional landscapes. Restricted but intense palettes push vegetation, stone and sky away from naturalism: blues, greens and pinks establish an atmosphere in which location is less important than the sense of crossing from one condition into another.
This approach is central to Shapeshifter, a body of work concerned with borderlands and with moments when ordinary divisions between time, place and identity begin to loosen. Volcanoes, doubled moons, water and mirrored surfaces recur across the paintings. Their repetition gives the series its own visual vocabulary, while reflections and paired forms suggest that more than one reality may be present at once.
The Jaguar and the Idea of Transformation
The jaguar is particularly important within this visual system. In Mesoamerican traditions it can be associated with the nagual, a figure connected with transformation between human, animal and spiritual states. Ortiz uses that idea less as illustration than as a way of organizing an uncertain world: the animal becomes a presence capable of moving through boundaries that the landscape itself refuses to keep fixed.
The paintings also connect with ideas developed by feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa around mixed heritage, borderland identity and the nagual. In Ortiz’s work, however, these questions are carried primarily through composition. A mirrored bird, a jaguar beside its reflection, an eclipse doubled in the sky, or a volcanic horizon can turn a seemingly still scene into an image about transition.
Color, Distance and an Unsettled Sense of Place
What gives the series much of its character is the tension between calm and instability. The spaces are often remote and sparsely occupied, yet their saturated color prevents them from becoming passive scenery. Plants and geological forms frame views with almost architectural clarity, while isolated animals and symbolic objects establish focal points within deep fields of color.
The result is a landscape practice in which place is never entirely fixed. Ortiz treats the borderland as both territory and condition: somewhere between cultures, between memory and observation, and between the real and the imagined.
Shapeshifter in New York
Shapeshifter is on view at Chart Gallery in Tribeca through October 31, 2026. The exhibition brings these recurring motifs together as a study of identity understood not as a single stable state, but as something capable of adaptation, reflection and change.
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Works from the Series
Jaguar Reflejado
Espejo Obsidiana
El Corredor
Floracion
Las Garzas
Equilibrium
Un Eclipse en Doble
