POROSITY: MATERIAL EXPLORATIONS GROUP EXHIBITION 2024

Paul Caporn, Caroline di Costa, Pam Gaunt, Josh Webb, Jurek Wybraniec.
Curated by Pamela Gaunt
WALLACE. www.instagram.com/wallace_at_with

This exhibition foregrounds five artists who explore the indeterminate phenomenon of Porosity in divergent ways: conceptual, physical, spatial and metaphoric.

In a contemporary sense, the term Porosity has come to embody multivalent interpretations. Geological, medical, scientific applications (sometimes used interchangeably with permeability), mostly refer to its physical and formal manifestations. More recently, the term has become more gregarious, accommodating socio-political, cultural and metaphoric applications.

In an architectural context, extensive research into perceptions of porosity in the built environment have evolved since Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’ 1925 essay on Naples.[1] Benjamin and Lacis[2] developed the term to describe the urban characteristics of the city of Naples; its dual porous nature stems from its foundations in volcanic rock, coupled with the built form’s physical porosity expressed by permeable networks of public/private spaces and borders. These merged spaces, at the time of writing for Benjamin and Lacis, facilitated utopian and dystopian social interactions.

Within a contemporary visual art context, the elastic or flexible condition of the word Porosity offers artists a rich source of inspiration. The works chosen for this exhibition materially explore porosity’s formal and semantic potential, using overt, subtle and hidden methodologies.

1. Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, AutobiographicalWritings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken,1978), 166-167. See also
2. Research suggests Lacis (Benjamin’s intellectual collaborator) may be responsible for the term.

Pam Gaunt, July 2024