Objects & Apparitions: A Portable Museum

Objects and Apparitions: A Portable Museum(2023)

silkscreen on window screen, acrylic paints, paper and wooden sculpture, wooden frames, found objects, etc. (Photo: Elena Bulet)

Dimensions variable

Objects and Apparitions: A Portable Museum, a ghostly sculptural prints collection, displays portable pedestal-like museum spaces for my painterly printmaking and sculpture works. This space combines three-dimensional printmaking works with paper and wooden objects on a pedestal, three two-dimensional hanging tapestries, with a series of prints on the wall. My transformable and portable wooden structures for printmaking take some selective belongings to the curiosities from my nomadic life. From a gentrified home to temporary art studios, my continuous stories from printmaking allow me to find new directions to guide my next journey.

The title, Objects & Apparitions, comes from a poem of the same name by Octavio Paz in 1974. In this poem, he described Joseph Cornell's collages with their micro and macro details, constellations, small figures, container boxes, etc. and summed up his characteristic narratives in the reading. His assemblages inside wooden boxes with found objects allow me to think of the way Robert Rauschenberg combines sculpture and printmaking. I look to both artists' works to validate my unconscious interest in the compositions of mundane things and the connections to daily life with illusionary surfaces. The silhouettes of images appeal to different shapes and compositions inside the rectangular three-dimensional frames. Here, I can translate his language of collages with sculptural printmaking in this framed format. In my work, I make reference to this specific display in the given condition. Those invisible artistic intentions make me curious about how curating my own work can connect me more with the viewers.

The wooden structures for printmaking that I use hold the stories of my belongings. Finding the curiosities of my own narratives, I incorporate personal selective archives from my grandmother's old fabric patterns and family photo albums, replacing a gentrified home with significant art objects from my studio. My attention to capturing those stories in a single form presents new directions for my next journey.

Ghostly prints absorb a playful camouflage of patterns, colors, and dimensional objects inside wooden portable containers. The various forms and materials that my collages are made of embody this feeling of kinship and how I deal with process change.