Liliana Porter, Rina Banerjee and Patricia Piccinini – all immigrants to the countries in which they live and work and thus outsiders to one degree or another – imagine and depict universes of extraordinary possibility. Connection and empathy are at the heart of each artist's oeuvre.
Liliana Porter (b. 1941, Buenos Aires, Argentina) uses found tchotchkes, positioned in improbable situations, to manipulate scale and time and subvert “reality.” Her conceptual strategies, developed in the course of a practice spanning nearly 60 years, are most closely related to the literary approaches of Latin American Magical Realism. With masterful simplicity and wit, she presents incredible situations as ordinary occurrences, providing viewers a safe place from which to explore big existential questions.
Rina Banerjee’s (b. 1963, Kolkata, India) sculptures are shamanistic assemblages of textiles, feathers, sparkling glass and tinkling bells. Beaded, embroidered and sensuously monstrous, they conjoin the exotic and rare with the cheap and mass-produced — rejecting conventional hierarchies of material and culture. In her paintings, chimeric female forms dance and float in states of hybrid transformation. In a post-colonial, global world, identity — racial, cultural or gender — is no longer easily defined. Banerjee offers up the optimistic prospect of a world freed from the constraints of conventional standards of beauty, worth, social pecking order and what is “proper.” We live in a moment of opportunity, Banerjee posits, a moment when it is possible to define yourself in a way that is truly authentic.
Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965, Freetown, Sierra Leone) explores the potentialities — both liberating and threatening — inherent in our advancing capabilities in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Her meticulously-crafted sculptures and finely wrought graphite drawings envision a co-mingling of animal, plant, machine and human, questioning the ‘otherness’ of creatures who don’t resemble ‘the norm.’ Piccinini's imagined beings are scientifically plausible and nearly possible embodiments of the complex ethical issues of our time.
