"…I became interested in the superposition of the image, the representation of something over the thing itself, shadow on shadow, wrinkle on wrinkle." -Liliana Porter, 2009 In this screenprint, the photographic apparition of a woman’s hand appears to make contact with a heavily-contoured, art-school study of a jug, sphere, and pyramid. Where these two illusory worlds meet, they seem to transfer their qualities onto one another, the finger leaving a blue print on the jug, the jug coating the fingertip in its creamy hue. Neither illusion is real, of course; they are the material facts of various inks on paper. For five decades, Porter has explored the radical possibilities of printmaking as conceptual art. Here she exploits the serigraph, a process by which each color is hand-applied through a separate silkscreen, to combine very different kinds of representation in a single space. The resulting image becomes a metaphor for the human body’s uncanny experience of encountering the world, the ways in which we endow objects with identities and interiority even as we become increasingly estranged from ourselves.
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