A Hand in Nature
Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
1485 Delgany Street, Denver, CO 80202
March 8–September 1, 2024
Admission: Adults: $14, College Students, Military, Seniors, and Teachers: $11, Members, Children, and Teens 18 and Under: free
Review by Paige Hirschey
Gala Porras-Kim’s latest exhibition, A Hand in Nature, opened at MCA Denver in March 2024—four years, almost to the day, after a coronavirus sent the world into lockdown. The pandemic forced us to reconsider much of what we had previously taken for granted, but one of its most striking effects was the anxiety it produced around the simple act of breathing. In the panicked days of early lockdown, every inhalation carried the risk of infection, every exhalation raised the possibility of exposing a vulnerable neighbor.
An installation view of Gala Porras-Kim’s exhibition A Hand in Nature at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the MCA.
COVID was on my mind when I saw Porras-Kim’s show; I had recently recovered from my first encounter with the virus. Although I had been testing negative for days and knew, logically, that pathogens don’t affect objects, I felt a stir of familiar anxiety when I leaned in to get a closer look at an abstract work. I noticed a coating of jewel-like condensation on the inner side of its protective glass shield—a sight sure to disturb anyone with even the most basic understanding of art conservation.
A detail view of Gala Porras-Kim’s Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022/2024, propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, dimensions variable. Image by Paige Hirschey.
The work, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (2022/2024), was created during the artist’s residency at London’s Delfina Foundation. As it turns out, the gold, green, and black shapes that populate the muslin canvas aren’t ink, as I had initially assumed, but mold spores propagated from a specimen the artist culled from the storerooms of the British Museum. It struck me that the moisture from my breath didn’t pose a threat to this work, as it would for so many of the objects typically displayed in museums. Instead, it might contribute to its growth.
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (beginning view), 2022/2024, propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, dimensions variable. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the MCA.
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (final view), 2022/2024, propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, dimensions variable. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the MCA.
If there is a unifying message to be gleaned from A Hand in Nature, a show dizzying in its thematic and material scope, it is this: try as we might to control it, the natural world has a life of its own. The pandemic forced us into this realization four years ago when a coronavirus tore open every fissure in our social fabric, but while COVID exposed us to the dark side of nonhuman agency, Porras-Kim opens our eyes to its poetry.
Gala Porras-Kim, Untitled (Water erosion), 2018/2024, alabaster, water, wood, and pump, 16.5 x 10 x 8.25 inches. Image by Paige Hirschey.
The earliest pieces in the exhibition deal primarily with natural forces rendered unfamiliar through their artificial re-creation. In Untitled (Water erosion) (2018/2024), the artist programs a noisy machine to dispense a single drop of water onto a slab of pink alabaster, once the previous drop has evaporated, eventually leaving a depression in the stone.
An installation view of Gala Porras-Kim’s exhibition A Hand in Nature. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the MCA.
One can’t help but think of Hans Haacke—a clear influence on the artist—who once told Jack Burnham that because of the slow pace of their activity, works like his Condensation Cube (1963-1968) only ever appeal to “the most sensitive and perceptive viewers.” [1] As in Haacke’s work, the meeting of nature and machinery in Porras-Kim’s piece is visually compelling, but it’s in her later works that the artist appears to hit her individual stride.
Gala Porras-Kim, A terminal escape from the place that binds us, 2024, ink on paper and document, 73 × 105 inches. Image by Paige Hirschey.
A detail view of Gala Porras-Kim’s A terminal escape from the place that binds us, 2024, ink on paper and document, 73 × 105 inches. Image by Paige Hirschey.
Among the most poignant pieces in the exhibition are those that deal with the fraught museological practice of collecting human remains. Over the course of several institutional residencies, the artist developed a range of imaginative alternatives to keeping bodies on display, including a striking work on paper, A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2024), in which the artist deployed encromancy—an ancient practice in which the dead are given space to communicate through the free flow of ink. In letters to museum directors accompanying the works, the artist uses frank language to discuss the incontrovertible tension between conserving past cultures and flagrantly disregarding their burial rites.
An installation view of Gala Porras-Kim’s exhibition A Hand in Nature. On the left: Asymptote towards an ambiguous horizon, 2021-2024, graphite and ink on paper,12 drawings, 18 x 22 inches each. On the right: Atmospheric reunion, 10,000yBP/2024, performance, water, ancient air, and present-day air. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the MCA.
These interventions run the risk of coming across as hollow gestures, but their sincerity is underwritten by the artist’s attempts to expose her viewers to remnants of the sacred in their own lived experience. In Waiting for an atmospheric reunion (10,000yBP/2024), deaccessioned samples of ancient ice cores are transformed into tangible portals to a distant past. Each of the specimens—now water encased in vacuum-sealed plastic bags—contain molecules that have been locked in ice sheets for thousands of years.
Gala Porras-Kim, Atmospheric reunion, 10,000yBP/2024, performance, water, ancient air, and present-day air. Image courtesy of the artist.
Thanks to the artist, they are tantalizingly close to becoming part of our shared atmosphere once again. Indeed, at the far end of the display a water-stained metal plate serves as the sole remnant of a performance in which the artist ceremoniously released the contents of one of the samples, subtly announcing that this “reunion” has already begun—and that the viewer, by virtue of their breathing, is now a part of it.
Gala Porras-Kim, The Weight of a Patina of Time, 2024, left: graphite on paper; middle: graphite on paper; right: colored pencil and encaustic on paper, three panels, 91 x 73.25 x 2 inches each. Image courtesy of the artist.
This charming sleight of hand is a testament to Porras-Kim’s disarming ability to show her viewers the wonder that remains in a world seemingly stripped of its capacity to enchant. Throughout the show, she appears to suggest that our society’s obsessive attempts to remove any sense of mystery from our lives, whether through science, engineering, or the disinterested posture of the anthropologist, are not only futile, but psychically harmful. They reinforce the modernist fairytale that the natural world is somehow set apart from us and therefore capable of being controlled. In calling our attention to sites where this fiction is revealed, she shows that there may yet be something to learn from the ritual practices of our ancestors—and that there is beauty to be found in the act of letting go.
Paige Hirschey (she/her) is a writer based in Boulder, Colorado. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Toronto.
[1] Jack Burnham, "Hans Haacke: Wind and Water Sculpture," Tri-Quarterly Supplement 1 (Spring 1967): 8.
