This show highlights the black-and-white works central to the artist’s oeuvre, including new, large-scale works on paper and her ongoing series, “Patterns of Change,” presented for the first time in its full 128- piece iteration. This exhibition establishes Ortiz as a working artist in the Catskills after nearly two decades in New York City. 

Her monochrome works are mature, spacious and otherworldly. Evoking a cosmic motif, her paintings are a study in contrasts: black and white, yin and yang, macro- and microcosms, expansion and contraction. Many of the works also reveal the nature of her internal landscape during the last 18-plus months of external seismic change. 

In Counterpart, Ortiz brings a refinement to her technique and her media, as well as a deepening freedom to her improvisational process through which the paintings manifest. The somatic movement in her brushstrokes evokes a dance of opposing forces in points and lines, where, amidst the chaos, a unifying balance is achieved.

Exhibiting in the large gallery space of 1053 Main Street allows Ortiz to play with the viewer’s proximity to the works. In “Patterns of Change,” for example, the series appears as if it’s a cohesive, singular work from afar, yet up close each of the 128 drawings opens up into distinctive compositions; whole universes unto their own.