Art on Campus - Gala Porras-Kim
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
GALA PORRAS-KIM
One Bag of Miscellaneous Spearheads and Sticks, 2009
Gala Porras-Kim
Graphite on Cotton Paper
11.25 x 8.25 inches
Courtesy of Commonwealth and Council
Location: Social Sciences Building, Second Floor
Gala Porras-Kim's work questions how knowledge is acquired and tests the potential of the art object to function as an epistemological tool outside of its traditional historical context. The work comes from a research-based practice that questions how intangible things; sounds, language and history, have been represented through different methodologies such as linguistics and conservation. The artist speculates on the possible narratives of the objects, the potential stories of fragments that reintroduce the exhibition to the current modes of representation. Its condition as such is understood and processed as part of a logic in which the artistic gesture of reformulation gives new life to the narrative of objects that would otherwise be lost in history; it considers the limits of museum practices through the strategies of contemporary art and allows materials to move from their locations in drawers and vaults to a new logic of exhibition and cataloging. For her installation in the Made in LA biennial at the UCLA Hammer Museum - an assembly of drawings, sculptures, and display mechanisms - Porras-Kim partnered with the Fowler Museum. She worked with the Fowler’s staff to select objects within the museum’s collection that are unidentified - lacking generally understood indicators of provenance and history such as date, medium, or site of origin - and has proposed hypothetical complete forms for these fragments. Her proposals, in the form of new objects, are singular suggestions for objects whose possibilities for interpretation are infinite. Speculating on the potential histories of these shards, pottery fragments, and pieces of material, Porras-Kim reintroduced the forms to present-day modes of representation. Their status as such is understood and processed by her as part of a contemporary logic, in which the artistic gesture of reframing and redrawing breathes new life into the potential narratives of objects that would otherwise be lost to history. Through a series of approaches that imbue materials with little to no cultural value as such with new meaning, Porras-Kim considers the limits of museological practices through the strategies of contemporary art, enabling the materials to move from their locations in drawers and vaults to a new logic of exhibition and display.
Gala Porras-Kim received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito (2018); LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2017); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2013); FOXRIVER, Singapore, Singapore (2010); and Dobaebacsa, Seoul, South Korea (2010). Selected group exhibitions include Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; Hab Galerie, Nantes, France; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2017); Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2017); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Triangle France, Marseilles, France (2015); and La Central, Bogotá, Colombia (2011). Porras-Kim is the recipient of the Artadia Award (2017), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2016), Creative Capital grant (2015), Tiffany Foundation Award in 2015, and the California Community Foundation Fellowship (2013). Her work will be shown at the 2019 Whitney and Ural Biennials, and she was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019.
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