Estephania González is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Drawing on Mesoamerican cosmology and quantum physics as active guides, she speculates on fractured borders, ecological collapse, and possible futures. In her first solo museum exhibition, González unfolds a trilogy of immersive installations that weave together the ritual tunnels beneath the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacan and Chicomoztoc, the "Place of the Seven Caves" central to Nahua origin accounts, to envision a sequence of imagined chambers in which archaeological evidence and narrative codices converge with cosmology as a living framework for imagining alternative realities.

Gonzalez presents the Chicomoztoc trilogy as three independent exhibitions, each a chamber in a cyclical journey that builds upon itself over time. The Cosmic Throne, the trilogy’s prologue, is the celestial origin point of possibility, conceived as an active threshold to a multidimensional reality. The Apocalyptic Borderland, the trilogy’s intermission, represents terrestrial, political, and ecological rupture, materially manifested in the symbolic US-Mexico border wall. Terminus, the trilogy’s epilogue, expands into a liminal state of consciousness unbound by geographic and temporal boundaries, toward transformative reworlding.

Chicomoztoc: The Cosmic Throne marks the initial descent into the tunnels, where concepts of time, space, and identity collapse. At its core is a polished obsidian pool that reflects the cosmos, symbolizing Tezcatlipoca, the Nahua deity whose obsidian mirror connects the visible world with realms of knowledge, transformation, and the unknown. An altar-like throne emerges from the pool, adorned with metallic and ceramic Mexica artifacts from various periods—some appearing partly unearthed—and illuminated by the reflective obsidian below and cosmic projection above. Serving as a symbolic link among the celestial, terrestrial, and chthonic realms, The Cosmic Throne becomes a threshold where microcosm and macrocosm converge, revealing patterns of interconnectedness between the individual and the universe.

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Lauren R. O’Connell, curator of contemporary art.