Nina Johnson presents The Ghost in the Hallway, an exhibition of mixed-media objects by Estafania Puerta that challenges how “carrier” is defined, both functionally— depicted in vessels, vitrines, and candle holders—and metaphorically, the way materials hold meaning and create personal or symbolic value. Puerta’s practice is rooted in materiality, incorporating inorganic and organic materials “to form a new poetics of transformation and translation.” Through the works in this exhibition, she explores the idea of boundary or border in her material choices and the objects she creates—what is display, or what acts as a kind of skin or exoskeleton protecting and holding something within? The complexity of these works—the variety of their materials and the range of the forms they take—create worlds all their own, layered and nuanced.
According to Puerta, the concept of the ghost in the hallway “is the moment in which we seem to catch something or someone from the corner of our eye that is briefly contained by the hallway—the hallway [acts as] a framing device, lets us see the ghost perfectly, as though it has been waiting there for us all along. The ghost in the hallway is a metaphor for the ephemeral that gets contained, even if in brief moments. The way a tomb contains a spirit, our mouths contain [language], and our collective consciousness contains histories. So much about this show is about containment and what either blooms outward or pulls you in to [look] closely. How we frame the ghost is how we see it. We give it a body, [we give it] a name, even if the name is half spoken.”
Some of the objects in this show, many of which conceptually began during Puerta’s time in Rome, were inspired by reliquaries and the sarcophagus as something that simultaneously functions as place, object, and a literary document of sorts. In the Bloom series Puerta creates mounted wall pieces using aluminum leaf, paper pulp, and stained glass that encloses a tiny cabinet of materials or drawings. Reproduction Question comprises a coffee table structure with a vitrine on the upper half containing small objects and text, enclosed by a colored Plexiglas; on the table is a canvas sculpture with a hole on top through which viewers can read the text in the vitrine.
Puerta was intent on engaging with the library space directly—“The shelves in the library are their own systems that organize language in the same way these pieces do”—and has scattered candle holders (the shapes of which are in formal conversation with the mounted wall pieces) among its shelves, transforming the space from gallery to reliquary. It is through these many materials, forms, and layers that Puerta simultaneously builds a world and reaches past it into another realm; these works seem to function through and across time as document, relic, but perhaps most urgently, as invocation.
Estafania Puerta: The Ghost in the Hallway is on view in the Exhibition Library through January 4th, 2025.
