Commonwealth & Council is pleased to present I Want to Prepare to Learn Something I Don’t Know, an exhibition by Los Angeles artist Gala Porras-Kim. Created during her two-week residency here in Koreatown, the works consider strategies that allow an access point into the surrounding neighborhood, such as listening to stories and traditions about places resulting in a mapping of sorts. They are tools to alleviate the alienation experienced by the lack of access and understanding of language that can obfuscate this landscape that we drive by on a daily basis.

I Want to Prepare to Learn Something I Don’t Know explores the relations between meaning, translations and cultural consumption through an underlying system of social signs. The work uses cultural elements that are part of the everyday visual language, which overwhelms the Koreatown landscape, and alienates the non-native at the same time. The work sets up a problem of de-contextualizing and re-appropriating these signs, as an attempt to address how meaning can be forced and altered as a method to make culture marketable.

Gala Porras-Kim was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009, BA from UCLA in 2007, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010. Recently, her work has been exhibited at Five Thirty Three and RedCat in Los Angeles, at Tompkins Projects in New York, and at Dobaebacsa HQ in Korea.