Tina La Porta opens her first solo exhibition, Side Effects in South Florida on September 29th in the FAR Gallery at FATVillage Projects. The presentation is a candid oeuvre on La Porta’s encounter with mental illness and her skilled approach to creating a pharmaceutical, candy-like frenzy to the viewer’s eye and psyche.

Far Gallery is a long corridor of two walls facing North and South to the main entrance, making the task for any curator or artist challenging to organize works within the space without it becoming predictable. Nonetheless, La Porta and curators Vee Carallo and Leah Brown strategized the area by assembling the wall sculptures in a non-linear format, concentrating on colors, geometric designs within the works and by the story of each prescription pill.

Although La Porta is open about her way of life and how her functionality depends on the suppression her pills provide, she also comments in Indian Summer (2003) on the comfortable accessibility people have to order any prescription online. With its deceiving romantic shades of pink and old rose, Indian Summer 2003 exudes an ill feeling to a morning-after pill, direct from India without any proper instructions or what damaging side effects one is to expect from it.

From La Porta’s grueling process to crush each pill, comes the construction of a larger disk or shape resembling a small tablet filled with an array of smaller capsules sprinkled in vibrant colors and delicious enough to want to bite. The sculptures look like cookies out of Willy- Wonka’s factory. It’s that “oh, sooo good to pop it in your mouth” feeling, successfully captured in Hand to Mouth, 2018 (plaster series). The series illustrates the severity of pharmaceutical dependency for folks who abuse the medical system, for individuals needing prescription drugs to function or the patient who is sternly instructed to “pick one” as La Porta shared after informing her doctor none were working; “plus, no one ever told me about all the crazy side effects I would have to deal with.”

Worse yet, as La Porta explains “no one ever took the time to address my illness; instead they kept wanting to masquerade it with pills and not help heal me.” That is when La Porta turned to the wallpaper series Listening to a Voice, 2018 and Speaking to a Voice Unknown, 2018. The series flamboyantly plays with tropical designs, elaborate florals and feminine wallpapers under resin sculptures to illuminate the idea of wallpapering a wall destroyed by the time-space, covering up unwanted ugliness to anyone who dares tread so close to it, similarly to a band-aid pill.

Side Effects is a quietly riveting exhibition because of its reflective nature but brightly bold in aesthetics and social comment on the pharmaceutical world.

Opening Reception September 29th, 2018 from 6 – 10 p.m. at FATVillage Projects and on view through October 27th, 2018.

Written by Beláxis Buil

Edited by Abel Folgar