curatorial + archival
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TWO REALITIES

Exploring the curatorial translations between the physical and virtual

Professional: Mead Art Museum 
Spring 2022
Mentor: Lisa Crossman 

The exhibition Two Realities foregrounds Argentinian-born, U.S-based artist Liliana Porter’s decades-long consideration of two realities—virtual reality (a depiction of a thing) and experienced reality (the real thing). By looking at Porter’s methods of assembling objects and recontextualizing them across physical and digital enviornments, our curatorial inquiries ask how representation further changes when her artworks and process materials are translated into digital renderings and interactive interfaces. We aimed to examine how the curatorial process itself is transformed, challenged, and enriched by new modes of encountering art and sought to understand how the curator’s role evolves with it. Shifting from staging objects in a gallery to orchestrating layered experiences across multiple media, we investigated how curatorial discourse expands expontentionally to redefine the possibilities of representation, engagement, and narrative construction for artworks and audiences.

I worked closely with head curator Lisa Crossman to conceptualize, research, and execute digital and physical exhibition spaces. My role centered on establishing interpretive frameworks that would generate productive tensions between physical and digital manifestations of Porter’s artistic practice. Through systematic documentation and digitization of Porter’s archival materials—including videos, journals, and process drawings—I created thematic repositories that served as generative starting points for student projects in Professor Niko Vicario’s corresponding Art History seminar  “Curating between the Virtual and the Physical: Liliana Porter”. 






Collecting Process Materials

During the exhibition’s initial research phase, the curatorial director and I visited Liliana Porter’s studio to identify and collect potential source materials—objects, images, video binders, and preliminary sketches—that would serve as conceptual building blocks for both digital and in-gallery interpretive activities. This firsthand engagement with the artist’s workspace enabled us to observe the materiality of her objects and her processes, ensuring that the curatorial strategies we devised were rooted in the authentic textures and narrative underpinnings of her practice.

From these primary encounters, we distilled thematic clusters and frameworks that could subsequently inform the structure of the students’ online curatorial endeavors. In doing so, we recognized that  the digital interface and the gallery’s designated process room each required distinct but interrelated approaches to meaning-making. 

While the online platform would invite broader public interaction, encouraging users to navigate and recombine materials into personalized interpretive paths, the physical process room would provide a tangible counterpart, allowing visitors to engage intimately with photographs, notes, and other traces of Porter’s creative mind.






Spectrums of Inquiry 

I see curation as a dynamic and interpretive act of translation—one that moves from an originating artistic practice through multiple layers of thematic inquiry to generate new fields of meaning. Rather than being a linear or static procedure, curation is positioned here as a prism, refracting a single source of inspiration into a multiplicity of interpretive strands and subsequent creative explorations.

The diagram introduces a prism-like element which represents the curatorial frameworks or conceptual apparatus through which Porter’s artworks were analyzed, dissected, and understood. As light is refracted, the curator’s engagement with the artist’s practice yields a set of emergent themes.

From these distilled themes, the diagram extends outward to multiple student projects. These curatorial projects respond to, elaborate upon, and test the themes in practice. Each can be seen as a further interpretive gesture—either affirming, challenging, or expanding the conceptual territory outlined by the curator.

Finally, emanating from the student projects, new questions and secondary themes emerge. This last stage emphasizes the iterative nature of the curatorial process, which does not end with the student’s proposed exhibitions; rather, it refracts further to expand the curatorial discourse, prompting reassessment, refinement, and sometimes a complete re-envisioning of prior interpretations.  





Spatial Situations

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