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6 years ago
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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 scu[...]
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7 years ago
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Dear Fabian, welcome to Art For Progress. As a contemporary artist based in Northern Germany, North Friesland. What is the focus of your art?
Hi Nerea, thanks for inviting me to this interview. I am delighted to contribute to Art for Progress. I am a sculptor focused on the human figure in the widest meaning. I try to find ways for contemporary depiction of the diverse spectrum of human expressions.
Having studied Fine Art Sculpture in Vienna, where modelling the human body has a long tradition – the so called “Wiener Schule,” I further worked in this direction in London, where I did my masters. I started to introduce new materials, inflatables and other ephemeral objects, as base bodies for my figurative constructions. When depicting an entire human figure, at some point you always need to decide whether or how much you show its gender. If you disregard it – partially or completely – you enter the world in-between genders. For the last five years in particular, I have been focusing on “Liquid Gender” and the liquidity of gender aspects in general.
I have noted that you chose the term “Liquid Gender” as a name for your recent exhibition in Barcelona. Can you please explain this choice.
“Liquid Gender” was indeed the title of the 2016 solo show, curated by Caterina Tomeo, at the end of a five-week residency at Espronceda (Centre for Art and Culture) in Barcelona. The central piece was a 2-channel video installation around my large-scale MENINA bronze series: A v[...]
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