Galindo extends his practice into the realm of speculative transformation, where borders of all kinds, geographic, corporeal, temporal, dissolve like salt in warm water.
Reception with the artist on Friday, July 17th from 5pm - 8pm. Live music, beverages, and snacks will all be available free of charge.
Artist Statement I
Guillermo Galindo is an experimental composer and sonic architect whose work dissolves the boundaries between music, visual art, and performance. His compositions venture into politics, humanitarian concerns, and social awareness, transforming sound into a medium for urgent storytelling about migration, environmental devastation, and cultural survival.
In The Vortex Remembers Everything: A Utopian Version of Earth, Galindo extends this practice into the realm of speculative transformation, where borders of all kinds—geographic, corporeal, temporal—dissolve like salt in warm water. In the spiral time of the vortex, what was solid becomes permeable. What was singular becomes multiple. The beings that emerge here are not mutations but revelations—ancient forms remembering themselves into futures where the very concept of crossing over loses meaning.
Through double-exposure images, Galindo conjures creatures who carry their ancestry in layered transparencies, bodies as palimpsests where each story remains visible, none erased.
The turtle shell speaks. It always has, though we forgot how to listen. Galindo retrieves this divinatory knowledge—not as nostalgia but as technology, an interface older than any digital dream. Read on the banners that hang in this space, the shell's patterns become star maps, migration routes, genetic codes spiraling across carapace and cosmos. The shell becomes portal, the border between worlds thin as membrane, viscous as dream.
Aquatic hybrids drift through these works like memories of a planet learning to breathe water again, their forms suggesting what might happen if bodies could unfold according to desire rather than necessity. Gender disperses like ink in water—not absent but diffused, present everywhere and nowhere, a quality of medium rather than discrete category. These beings know that borders—between ocean and atmosphere, dream and reality, self and other—are stories we tell ourselves about separation.
This is divination: the art of reading what is already present but not yet visible. The double exposures reveal what we already are—beings living in multiple worlds simultaneously, already hybrid, already crossing borders with every breath. In the vortex, everything that has ever been still is; everything that might be already exists in potential.
The exhibition is not representation but portal. Welcome to the Earth as it could be, as it once was, as it is becoming. The vortex remembers. It has been expecting you.
Artist Statement II
A musical score is a set of codified symbols waiting to become sound. For years, my fascination with this translation—from notation to vibration, from the visible to the audible—has expanded into a broader inquiry: how has Western culture encoded the world in order to extract from it, and what remains when those codes fall silent?
In the journey of exploration, the unfamiliar is named, measured, and absorbed into systems of classification and control. Where many Indigenous and non-Western traditions understood the land as a living body one belongs to, Western colonial logic inverted this—turning ecosystems into commodities, geographies into lines drawn for the benefit of distant capitals. This unilateral gaze has shaped our relationship to the earth since the first European maps were drawn across the Americas.
But what happens when the naming stops? When the printed symbols have no one left to read them? When the borders, the scores, the catalogs outlive the civilization that produced them?
This is the territory I inhabit now.
Drawing from forgotten traditions and experimental composition, my work follows sound past the threshold of its ethereality—into the moment where it crystallizes as image, as notation, as score, as symbol, only to dissolve again into tone, into vibration, into what it always was before we tried to write it down.
The earth turns, as it always has, whether or not there is a word for it.
Artist Bio
Guillermo Galindo began as a classical composer—writing symphonies and operas—before reconceiving sound itself as a living, generative force. Drawing from shamanic traditions, Mesoamerican cosmology, and the animist understanding that all matter carries a life force, his work is animated by a single obsessive inquiry: what happens at the boundary—geographical, political, psychological, biological, and gendered—where one world ends and another begins?
That preoccupation takes its most visceral form in his Cyber Totemic Healing Devices—large-scale sonic sculptures built from objects recovered at sites of rupture. Clothing and water bottles abandoned at the Mexico/U.S. border, sections of refugee boats washed ashore on Lesbos, fragments of forest burned to ash: in Galindo's hands these become sonic devices, their physical history inseparable from the sound they produce. His Border Cantos series fuses this sonic practice with the visual language of photography through his collaboration with Richard Misrach.
This fusion of visual and sonic thinking runs throughout his work. The Sonic Botany installations pair graphic notation prints with interactive soundscapes that interrogate the commodification of the living world. Sonic Biogenesis, Genomics and Mutant Jungles (2022) treats biological form itself as a boundary—between species, between organic and synthetic life, between legible and mutant form. His exhibition Ruido Negro probes a post-Anthropocene horizon beyond the permanence of the human on the planet, where sound, image, matter, figuration, and code serve as elements in the perpetual creation of the living.
Boundaries of gender and the psyche surface with particular intensity in Piercing Kisses—a work in which an insect's encounter with human skin becomes a meditation on transformation, hidden desire, and the permeability of the self. The skin, that most intimate of borders between inner and outer worlds, becomes the site where the unconscious breaks through—where what is concealed, primal, and discomforting demands acknowledgment. Galindo's visual work in this series combines abstract and figurative elements to probe the fluid, symbiotic connections between non-binary human identity and the non-human world—plant, animal, insect—resisting fixed categories of gender, species, and self.
The boundary between performer, audience, and instrument dissolves in Remote Control, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, in which audience members become active participants—their smartphones transformed into sound and light emitters, the concert hall rewired as a collective nervous system addressing the dehumanization of violence and the militarization of virtual space.
His collaboration with Cristóbal Martínez as the electronic duo Red Culebra pushes these boundaries into interspecies territory. Their work Let Us Speak Frog—made in response to Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction—attempts to learn and embody frog language as an act of both grief and contact, the human body extended and transformed until the line between dancer and animal blurs.
In his 2025 SITE Santa Fe Biennial work Atomic Saints, Historic Tricksters, Galindo recreates Picasso's Guernica in charred wood from New Mexico wildfires, collapsing the boundary between historical trauma and present catastrophe, between image and material, between monument and ruin. The prospect of total dissolution recurs in If It Was Ever to Be Used: On the Possibilities of "Undo", which reprises Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room inside a decommissioned missile silo near Roswell. Playing back a recorded conversation with a nuclear scientist, re-recording it as the sound resonates through concrete and metal walls, and repeating the process recursively, Galindo dissolves language into pure frequency—the boundary between the human voice and silence finally, irrevocably crossed.
Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), his work is held at LACMA, the de Young, Crystal Bridges, and the National Gallery. He teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.