Maria Porges
[4][5] Porges is best known for the curiously labeled wax bottle sculptures she created throughout the 1990s and early oughts,[6][7][8] together with the tools and weapons fashioned from books that appear throughout her career.
[1][4][3] According to critic Sarah S. King of Art in America, "[Porges] invites viewers to focus their attention on the paradoxical relationships between empirical and subjective systems of interpretation through clever juxtapositions of objects, images and words.
[19][20][15][21] Subsequent solo exhibitions took place at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (2008) and Sanchez Art Center (2016),[22][23] and galleries such as John Berggruen (1995–2003), Seager Gray (2016) and Fourth Wall (2023, retrospective) in the Bay Area,[24][9][1] David Beitzel Gallery (2000) and Littlejohn Contemporary (2003) in New York, James Harris (2001, Seattle) and Carrie Secrist (2003, Chicago).
Art observers have characterized Porges' work as philosophical and Dadaistic in its approach, as its charged juxtaposition of text and imagery raises questions about meaning and how it is made.
[8][9] Kathleen Whitney of Sculpture wrote, "Porges places a verbal proposition in contention with the mechanics of visual communication in a way that confounds both… Involved with creating meaning through association and context, her work questions basic expectations of the role art serves.
Reviewers characterize her bottle sculptures as possessing a formal sensibility akin to the still lives of Giorgio Morandi,[1][27] while noting a marked aesthetic contrast with other works—including some concurrently developed—which they describe as more "enigmatic"[8] and "less mediated.
[24][12] Squeeze (1993–2001), an hourglass shaped object in hot sculpted glass, explores a scientific principle called "the observer effect," distorting the text mounted on a wall behind as viewers try to read it.
[1] Other cast works featured bronze relief drapery samples and oversized hands in various materials and settings that were based on fragments and gestures from art-historical paintings.
[39] Those that appeared in her 2000 show "Miraculous Vessels" were described by New York Times critic Ken Johnson as "poetic" and "metaphysical," suggesting such impalpable contents as "Youth With Wisdom," and "Solitude Without Loneliness.
"[25] In similar fashion, her 1999 sculpture Natural Magic: Cures for Modern Maladies features a miscellaneous assortment of bottles with intangible labels such as "For Compassion Fatigue" and "To Relieve Boredom."
"[8] Her satirical piece Acts of (Self) Deception (2000) critiques the hyperbolic use of language with imaginary bottle contents that include "The Science of Square Dancing" and "The Art of Point-of-Purchase Packaging.
Together, the works formed a Baroque-inspired narrative involving books, girls in large wigs and sculpted heads of children, which explored the Enlightenment and its deleterious effects in the west and themes of parenting, childhood, education and knowledge.
Critic David M. Roth called the "Stories" pieces "unsettling adult fairy tales" whose "Dadaistic logic treats the line between adulthood and childhood as a permeable membrane.
Her critical writing has been published in Artforum,[2][41] Sculpture,[42] Art in America,[43] Artweek,[44] American Craft,[45] The New York Times Book Review,[46] Hyperallergic[47] and SquareCylinder,[48] among other publications.
