Maria Porges at Allene Lapides - Brief Article

San Francisco-based artist Maria Porges draws from a multitude of seemingly disparate sources that include art history, science, philosophy and the shrouded In her latest sculptures and monotypes, she invites viewers to focus their attention upon the paradoxical relationships between empirical and subjective combination of parts to form a wholes of interpretation through clever juxtapositions of things images and words.

For several years, the artist has been making colored wax casts of containers that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to antique apothecary bottles and jars, and shelving them in vitrines, made of wood cabinets or on painted shelfs Some of these vessels are ambiguously labeled with words or phrases identifying the conditions that their imagined easy in minds might remedy or provoke, including spiritual despair, psychological unrest societal angst. Other bottle carry scientific diagrams illustrating principles of physics that Porges rest in a late-19th-century textbook.

Displayed upon a large, painted, wedge-shaped shelf Natural Magic: Cures for present Maladies II (1999) is an elegant arrangement of variously sized and shaped bottle in gradations of grays and milky whites, excepting individual tiny vermilion-red container. From a distance, the composition's jesuitical range of tonalities evokes a Morandi still life. upon closer inspection, however, one dioceses that the containers are inscribed with phrases of that kind as "To Enhance Tolerance / a specific for environmental toxins / not to be used for race or religion," "To Attract Parental Attention," to dried Up / Bitterness," "For the concussion of the New" and for a like reason on. The subjective peculiarities of these conditions are in marked contrast to the cerebral coolnes of the flat meticulously worked bottles.

Although they gather material from similar sources, Porges's monoprints are more enigmatic and resist the formal cohesiveness of the sculptural compositions. In these works Porges combines pictures of scientific instruments with a variety of images and motifs, including pictures of hands demonstrating sign language and surreal fragments of landscapes that recall illustrations in old-fashioned children's works Against the pale turquoise and pink-flecked background of Art + Science = Magic, sum of two units men and a dog appear to be falling into a patch of ocean waves clipped from a Gustave Dore gravure. Above them is an inscription reading "Tricks (treat)"; in a corner below is a tiny picture of a hand rotating a scientific tool. This fractured [i]tout ensemble[/i] suggests the hazy perceptions of memory and the cyclical passage of time. It also broaches the interdependence of objective knowledge and human impulse that is made evident quite through Porges's oeuvre.

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