La Mojarra Stela, Installation view at the Whitney Biennial, 2019

Graphite on paper, 108 x 72.75 in (274 x 185 cm) each; 1 of 3 "For the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Porras-Kim addressed La Mojarra Stela 1, a glyph-covered Mesoamerican monolith that was discovered in a river in Veracruz, Mexico in 1986 and, so far, remains completely untranslated. In lieu of a linguistic, syntactic understanding of the carved text, Porras-Kim offered three alternative ways to make meaning from the mute stone. In the first, she performed an idiosyncratic, formal analysis, using color-coded transparencies to separate the markings by shape: circles, squares, squiggles. In the next, a replica of La Mojarra Stela 1 was attached to a panel covered in graphite marks, as if regarding itself in an obsidian mirror. And in the third, titled La Mojarra Stela incidental conjugations (2019), a drawing of the glyphs arranged in written order was accompanied by a rotating, water-filled disc containing plastic cutouts of the same symbols; as they tumbled, the two layers of glyphs aligned, or not, in meaningful ways— or not." -Travis Diehl