At first glance, Gala Porras-Kim’s large-scale colored pencil drawings look like candy-colored Kunstkammer (cabinets of curiosities).
Porras-Kim’s cabinet-like drawings are meticulous recreations of artifacts originally found in the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá and are now housed in museums. Renaissance-era predecessors to modern museums, the cabinets are encyclopedic collections of rare and often “exotic” objects. Porras-Kim’s solo exhibition, “Between Lapses of Histories,” is on display at the Pitzer College Art Galleries through March 22.
Porras-Kim’s work provokes questions about how context determines sanctity. At their original home in Chichén Itzá, the objects were thrown into the cenote as votive offerings to the Mayan rain god, Chaac. They were probably meant to stay in the Cenote forever. For centuries, the offerings lay submerged in water among thousands of other objects and several bodies.
So what happened to the sanctity of these objects when they were excavated, taken not only out of the Sacred Cenote but out of Chichén Itzá and Mexico, scattered away from each other and into museums, estranged from their ritual function? As we see them now — centuries later, much drier and in display cases and catalogs — the objects have been recontextualized into historical artifacts.
When does an object become an artifact? The word “artifact” implies a token from some ruined, bygone world, an object whose meaning has been annihilated into the purely historical. But the sacred cenote objects were meant to stay buried — lost forever. This condition was part of their sanctity as offerings. So what now, now that they have been found? Dredged out of their resting place?
The transition from offering to artifact is echoed in Porras-Kim’s work through the transition she creates from artifact to drawing. If the museum context often flattens objects, taking them out of the spiritual and cultural context they were born into, then Porras-Kim’s drawings literally flattens objects, turning three dimensions into two.
The colored pencil drawings of offerings for the rain depict artifacts on display case shelves, manipulating their objects into angular patterns. In “27 Offerings for the Rain at the Field Museum,” for example, the gold and brown objects are held by white shelves that curl across the blue background like a maze.
Porras-Kim’s black and white graphite drawings, which depict beads, fragments and pieces of fabric, include the notation and numeric scale that you would find in a catalog or book. Their titles are replications of the catalog titles of each plate. “Plate 25. A. Beads with decorated shafts; b, c. beads made from older carvings, and fragments (see pp.24, 27). (Lothrop, p.64),” for example, is the title of one of Porras-Kim’s drawings.
The drawings are as much about how we see artifacts — the space they exist in, how they were made accessible to us, the vehicles through which art and history are transmitted — as they are about the artifacts themselves. By deciding to include the minutiae of museum display, Porras-Kim makes us aware of how space is imposed on the objects. It’s a display within a display.
“Porras-Kim’s work provokes questions about how context determines sanctity.”
The artifacts Porras-Kim draws have been taken out of their original waterlogged home and, with often damaging methods, into dehydrating storage spaces. Many are actively disintegrating, holding their form only through conservation methods.
In an interview with the Getty Museum, Porras-Kim asked: “What makes an object when it’s object-shaped but is not the object anymore?”
Her work approaches an answer to this question. In recreating the objects as drawings, she is creating a version of them that is durable. As the objects fall apart into dust particles, she reconstructs them with pencil and paper.
So, maybe it’s not an answer that she’s drawing but an imagined, alternative reality — one where the objects are back in the depths of the Sacred Cenote. Within her drawings and cohabitating within the gallery space, the artifacts are reunited as if they never left.
Through this imagined space, which sits somewhere between the Sacred Cenote and the museum machine, Porras-Kim successfully explores the complicated past and futures of these objects while acknowledging the observer’s place in this machine — and, by extension, her place.
“The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred,” John Berger writes in his 1972 book “Ways of Seeing.” “But it was also physical. It was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made.”
Porras-Kim’s drawings feel like a return to the preserve: both the literal preserve — the Sacred Cenote — and the preserve of an object’s ritual purpose. In Porras-Kim’s work, the objects are again living things, again eternal and again embedded in a process.
Art columnist Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is from Austin, Texas. She is chalant.
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