By Hannah Zhang ‘22, Mead Curatorial Intern, 2021–2022
Sitting across the couch from Liliana Porter in her brightly lit barn-turned-art-studio, I watch as she pulls out one of her most recognizable video subjects: a wind-up-figurine wearing a red top and blue pants, with a striped hat on his head and cymbals in his hands.
“What I was interested in,” Liliana explains, “was the moment he stopped.”
She winds him up and places him on the wooden floor. The cymbals crash against each other for about ten seconds, gradually slowing down as the clockwork motor reaches an abrupt halt.
For a moment, everything pauses. Liliana puts out her hand to indicate the silence.
“So I thought,” she finally continues, “if I want to show the silence, first I have to show the noise. And to show the noise, you have to make a video or film. And that was how it started.”
Liliana’s captivation with silence is similarly evident in her prints and works on canvas, which are often defined by white space. Her art welcomes absence, presenting it as a kind of realm of its own. In her visual reductionism, simple, everyday objects are untethered from their defining contexts, removed from real or even representational space, and propelled into an abstract non-space, where meaning might be made from any direction.
Liliana’s exhibition “Two Realities” at the Mead, organized by Mead curator Lisa Crossman in collaboration with Professor Niko Vicario’s course “Curating Between the Virtual and Physical”, focuses on exploring the practice of organizing and presenting art in physical and online spaces.
Working with Lisa Crossman as a curatorial intern for the Mead, I experienced the process of building an exhibition from initial conception to opening, both physically and virtually. After a few weeks of researching Liliana’s work and discussing the vision for the exhibition and course with Lisa, I was lucky enough to accompany Lisa on a studio visit to Rhinebeck, New York to meet Liliana and help sort, gather, and curate materials to create a digital archive.
When we arrived at their home in Rhinebeck, Liliana and her wife and frequent collaborator Ana Tiscornia welcomed Lisa, our digital projects coordinator Carolyn, and me with lunch. Strange, magical objects littered the rooms. Framed abstract pieces, some made by Liliana or Ana, and others made by dear friends (Liliana was delighted to explain the Ray Johnson print hanging in the bathroom) populated the walls. A light-up wolfman figurine, salvaged from its past life as a cheesy halloween decoration, now stood by the bookshelf as if a guardian of the magic hidden within the pages. A blue, semi-transparent vase holding a few wildflowers sat on a table next to a framed painting of a leafy plant. A Superman lamp glowed above the fireplace in the living room and the top of an old wooden chair, separated from the rest of its body, rose from the ground. A large swan figurine sat by the windowsill and a playing card–a red queen of diamonds–was taped below a canvas and a framed print in the dining room. Liliana’s space was saturated with portals to other worlds, situating random objects in dialogue with one another, resulting in the formation of unexpected relationships and new ways of understanding the things we thought we knew.
After chatting over lunch, we moved into Liliana’s studio. As Lisa and Liliana talked about finalizing the exhibition checklist, Carolyn set up her camera and began documenting as much as possible – from the physical space, the wooden panels and glass cases lined with an assortment of toys and figurines, to the mental spaces, ideas sketched in pencil tucked away in some old, forgotten journal. I was assigned to look through archives of Liliana’s process materials, shelves and boxes packed full with notebooks, journals, and video binders containing endless edits, emails, rough sketches and drafts, and logistical information. After spending an afternoon immersing myself in the contents of Liliana’s creative process, the core philosophies of Liliana’s work began to emerge – I discovered an artist devoted to intense experimentation, reassured by the perpetual cycles of deconstruction and disassociation. Committed to transforming the familiar and overlooked into something unrecognizable and demanding of new attention, Liliana consistently asks her viewers to reconsider what they believe to be real. Her most recent work with ‘them” magnifies themes central to her practice – the simultaneity of oppositional forces, the ever-shifting multiplicity of meaning, and the importance of integrating the medium as a part of the content itself. Never lacking in humor, empathy, and curiosity, Liliana’s art is animated through her eclectic and beloved objects, eager to project their own personalities into the boundless, white space – into the silence.
Following Liliana’s studio visit, Carolyn, Lisa, and I got to work building the digital archives for Professor Vicario’s class. We sorted and curated video files and still images, compiling the materials necessary for the students to create their own curatorial projects. Exploring the spaces between the physical and the virtual, the students of the course produced various conceptions of what an online exhibition might look like in an interactive, digital realm. The projects can be found on the website for Curating between the Virtual and the Physical: Liliana Porter.
A few weeks later, Lisa invited me to help her make some final layout decisions for the physical exhibition at the Mead. We discussed the general themes that each gallery might propose and repositioned artworks to perhaps establish more interesting dialogues. I learned so much from the installation process, getting a sense of how a curator thinks through objects and shapes in a physical space, and uses space to draft the questions that loom after spending so much time with the artist and their work.
Working with Lisa on the Porter exhibition has been one of the most memorable experiences of my Amherst career. I am so grateful to Lisa for giving me the opportunity to accompany her in the process of building the physical and virtual spaces for this project, and for being so patient with my never-ending questions, childlike enthusiasm, and flustered frustrations with the world of art. It is, as this past year has taught me, full of unresolvable contradictions, peculiar, infuriating, and always filled to the brim with hope.
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