Commonwealth & Council extends its dialogue about cooperative knowledge and the shared experience of art with The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today, Gala Porras-Kim’s third solo exhibition with the space that further tests the potential of an art object to function as an epistemological tool. 

Porras-Kim incites an open system for interpreting the artifacts containing undeciphered scripts such as Mesoamerican writing systems, and invites the viewer to language abstraction through recodification and engagement. Despite their current stasis, the pending decipherment of ancient scripts proposes a futurity of stories from the past unfolding in the present. The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today presents a series of hand-drawn diptychs. One part renders an artifact splayed on view from all sides while in the adjoining part, the individual elements of incised scripts are re-collated into another symbolic order, presenting a new possibility of meaning. Also included in the exhibition are replicas of stone artifacts that the viewer is invited to consider through manual paper rubbings. Like the diptych drawings, this work is realized when the viewer engages with the stones to make his/her own impression. Available as a tool to encode and decode texts, Porras-Kim offers a print edition of a “tabula recta,” which has been the basis for many ciphers today. 

Gala Porras-Kim has been included in exhibitions at 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, CA; La Central, Bogotá, Colombia; Tompkins Projects, New York, NY; FOXRIVER, Singapore; and Dobaebacsa HQ, Seoul, Korea. She received her BA from UCLA (2007), MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2009), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2010). She is a 2013 California Community Foundation Fellow.