Aztec priests wore the skins of their sacrificial victims in annual fertility rituals honoring Xipe Totec (“Our Lord, the Flayed One”), their god of Spring. He was a powerful life-death-rebirth deity, who enabled the annual return of the crops.

On his opening night, Irvin Morazan, wearing a giant Mayan-inspired headdress that is blood red and fleshy in the image of a horse, enters the main door of the gallery, down the long processional corridor to a ritual chamber in the rear. There, seated on a throne is another headdressed “priest.” Intensely solemn, otherworldly music sets the tone, as the two assume positions opposite each other—sporting erections—and, with the aid of microwave ovens, proceed to create more and more of this fleshy substance, which they then throw at each other in messy combat.

Needless to say, this is not a literal re-performance of Aztec ritual. The Aztecs didn’t have horses—let alone microwaves. Nonetheless, it is inspired by the rich cultural history of the Pre-Columbians. Morazan, born in El Salvador, is indeed descended from Mayans. But he is educated in the US at the School of the Visual Arts (BA, 2003) and instead looks to what remains of his pre-Columbian visual and cultural heritage (much of it was systematically destroyed by the Spaniards) as rich source material for his own explorations in contemporary art.

Morazan’s headdresses and horse sculptures commemorate the displaced and exterminated indigenous tribes of the Americas. He writes:

The Mayans were innovators who excelled in mathematics, politics, botany, astronomy, architecture and the arts. Shamans served as intermediaries between humans and the supernatural: they had visions that allowed them to move freely beyond the ordinary world, and beyond death, to deal directly with gods, ancestors, or anything within the spirit world. When depicted in painting and pottery, the shaman were often portrayed in the act of creativity. To the shaman, the process was a notable act that demonstrated the ritualistic qualities in art making. The horse was a crucial factor in the conquest and demise of indigenous cultures of the Americas. The Mayans and other Native Americans hesitated from fighting against the Europeans during the time of the conquest because they feared and respected the horse. It came to symbolize the end of their way of life.

After the performance, the headdresses and horse costume—along with the throne and the strewn aftermath of their war—remain parked in the gallery. As sculptures, they are gory and ominous as oversized carcasses, and as strangely beautiful as flesh itself.