Tania Pérez Córdova: Short Sight Box

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Short Sight Box, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Tania Pérez Córdova (Mexican, b. 1979). The show will also be her first solo exhibition in New York.

Pérez Córdova’s contemplative artworks relate to the temporality and lifespan of objects. She works with a wide range of materials such as bronze, glass, earth, and marble. In her sculptures, she often incorporates a variety of both natural and mass-produced items ranging from jewelry, volcanic ash, gun powder, bread, and money. This eerie combination of elements is used as means of reflecting upon and reenacting cultural values, historical events, and personal stories alike.

Her sculpture has been described as inherently linked to an event. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman Passing By, a glazed ceramic is mirrored by the fleeting presence of an unknown woman who occasionally visits the gallery space. In To wink, to cry, a marble piece holding on contact lens is completed by the encounter with the gaze of a person wearing the contact’s mate. Still, Pérez Córdova’s work’s frequently implying human presence in its indexical nature, the objects are never truly about the performative gesture in and of itself as much as they are about the possibility of the encounter.

Pérez Córdova uses language to situate each sculpture within a larger narrative, incorporating personal, historical, and social circumstances as integral to an object’s making.

The exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery presents a constellation of works including two new series of sculptures. In Short Sight Box, the titular sculpture in the show, Pérez Córdova dug and then cast a series of holes of varying dimensions. Each sculpture functions both as a physical reminder of emptiness, as well as a practical container hosting rainwater, a silver necklace of Mexican Peso coins, a pair of pearls—one real, one fake—, and volcanic ash. Some of the holes are installed upside down, revealing the strange painterly nature of the petrified earth and roots encrusted during the process of casting.

In the series Contours, liquified bronze was poured into patterns drawn into the sand to create what the artist describes as approximations of real spaces. Outlines of windows, doors, and passageways recall memories of extant rooms redefining the position of an unknown observer the potential bearer of such memory. Adding to the construct, come contours seem to reflect the perspective of the viewer standing at a determinate angle, layering the relationship between the object and the experience of the object. 

Following a period of intense global isolation, Tania Pérez Córdova’s practice feels especially poignant as she zeroes in on the real and imaginary space created between object and viewer. Not only does she reframe this traditional relationship by embedding indeterminate and invisible variables into her sculptures, but she further expands it by forming a connection to a third party: a person, a situation, a location outside in the world.

About Tania Pérez Córdova

Born in 1979, Tania Pérez Córdova lives and works in Mexico City. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2017) and Kunsthalle Basel (2018). Her works have been included in a number of institutional exhibitions including the Aichi Triennale (2019), SITE Santa Fe (2018), the Gwangju Biennale (2016), the New Museum Triennial (2015), and the Shanghai Biennial (2012).