Gala Porras-Kim*
LOT 14
Vessel with lip 2, 2017
Unglazed ceramic, steel, mahogany
6 x 10 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council
Suggested retail value: $9,000
Starting bid: $5,000
About the Artwork
What happens when artifacts from a culture with an oral tradition are collected into a predominantly visual archive? How can such an archive serve to restore such artifacts—if not to their native context, then to some functional mode of communication? These fundamental problems of knowledge acquisition, visual representation (both ethnographic and aesthetic), and historiography permeate Gala Porras-Kim’s (Headlands Artist in Residence ‘18) practice. An Index and Its Histories (2017-18), which featured Vessel with lip 2, culminated a three-part project dealing with the Proctor Stafford Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 235 diverse west Mexican ceramics—a collection largely comprised of what are thought to be burial figurines and vessels from Colima, Nayarit, and Jalisco on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, dating from 200 BCE-500 CE—were acquired by LACMA in 1986 from Proctor Stafford and have been collectively grouped under his name. Porras-Kim took this seemingly straightforward archival move as a provocation to delve into the naming practices and cataloging methods at the institution, interrogating how a western collector’s name comes to identify such a heterogeneous group of indigenous artifacts. Porras-Kim studied the formal vocabulary of objects found in Jalisco and offered parallels from our contemporary visual lexicon. In this exploratory lexical context, the sculptures can be arranged through repetition and recombination in complex sequences, or sentences. We can begin to imagine patterns—Porras-Kim suggests an alternate historical account in which what we see is not just an image, but the building blocks for a phonetic language—to be read, sounded out, and ultimately spoken. Porras-Kim has had recent solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. Her work is in the collections of LACMA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and Seoul Museum of Art, among others. Porras-Kim is a recipient of the Gold Art Prize, Art Matters Foundation Grant, Artadia Los Angeles Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and Creative Capital Grant for Visual Artists.
HOW TO BID:
Bidding is available from May 19-June 6.
1) Text 'READY TO BID' or call 628-279-6010.
OR
2) Visit the Headlands Auction Exhibition to see the artwork and bid via pencil & paper.