Liliana Porter: Dot and Others

Liliana Porter, a New York-based artist of Argentinean origins, draws from her extensive collection of souvenirs, toys, functional knickknacks and figurines in the creation of her work. In photographs, video, and prints, Porter represents these figures in various scenarios that, with masterful simplicity, distill life into its basic elements, at once playful and tragic. For this exhibition she will also create 3-D situations, using the actual objects in “live dialogue”.

Porter typically places two or more objects together to create unexpected encounters. Decontextualized against white or black backgrounds, the objects shed their standard identities and acquire a poignant humanness. Minnie Mouse kisses Che Guevara’s portrait on a plate, two choirboy candles sing with a plastic bluebird, and a toy soldier shoots at a fat piggy bank. These mass-produced kitsch objects become characters we empathize and identify with, actors that elicit and exude emotion in mini dramas about life, love, longing, and loss. In her dialogue of differences, she declassifies and subverts the visual order of things, reconstructing contexts to deconstruct meaning.