On Product, Resources, and Merchandise

Ruth: Sandra, we’ve known each other for almost twenty-five years now, which is hard to believe! Last year we crossed paths again at Skowhegan and, despite familiarity with your work, it gave me the chance to get much closer to many of your processes.

It was especially interesting because I hadn’t had the opportunity to see two of your most recent projects, Pinacoteca Migrante (Migrating Pinacoteca), presented at the 2023 Venice Biennale; and Buen Gobierno (Good Governance) an exhibition for the art space Alcalá 31 in Madrid. Your presence at the School allowed all of us to better understand these recent works, especially in relation to the social contexts in which they were exhibited.

Sandra: Yes, indeed, we’ve known each other for twenty-five years, since a time when my focus was on the “object” of contemporary art, its modes of display, production, and, of course, commodification…

Ruth: That’s true. In fact, even though the themes have shifted over time, your practice remains deeply concerned with forms of display and appropriation. I’ve always thought that, at its core, your work asks who the represented subject is, who is the one deciding how to present it, and finally, who is looking; and often about the exchange between them: subject–object–gaze.

Mercancía (Goods), the limited edition you created to support the School, presents a series of “archeological” objects on shelves that could belong in a museum’s storage, but might just as easily be part of a commercial storage facility as well, ready to be transported or catalogued. The very notion of “goods” gives them a radically different value from that of the “object of research.”

What does a setting like Mercancía (Goods) represent for you?

Sandra: The print Mercancía (Goods) comes from a series of works made in 2018. In that project, the classical genres of painting—portrait, landscape, and still life—were renamed as product, resource, and merchandise, respectively, whenever the represented subjects or objects originated from the colonized territories in Latin America. 

The image in the print comes from the Larco Museum’s public archival storage in Lima. Unlike the objects displayed in the museum galleries, where works are isolated and illuminated for the best viewing conditions, what is shown in this storage is precisely the idea of accumulation.

Ruth: I remember visiting the Larco Museum on one of my trips to Lima. It’s like a permanent waiting room where the possession as much as the categorization of the objects is surprisely accessible to the public. Objects lose their meaning when they are detached from their original function: partly because of temporal distance, but also because so many cultures have been erased or appropriated by others. As you pointed out, accumulation also grants them a capitalist meaning. 

Over the past decades there has been extensive discussion around the decolonization of museums and the narratives surrounding exhibited objects. How do you approach the passage of time and history in your work?

Sandra: To decolonize an institution such as the museum, which is inherently colonial, is to dismantle the notion of a past time and a future of progress. It means integrating into the museum’s discourse—its classificatory, descriptive, and temporal structures—the very history of how these objects arrived into their respective vitrines. That part of the story implicates us as citizens within that history. When I reference objects that participated in the construction of our nation-states, I draw upon that “single” history that appears fixed, immovable, neutral—almost innocent—in order to activate a shared visual memory and inscribe other readings onto it.

I work on the very skin of these objects, sometimes alluding to restoration, and other times blending into what might appear to be the earliest layers of the pictorial process in itself. Painting becomes a metaphor for temporalities that intersect and blur into one another.

Ruth: I’m thinking about the Benjaminian notion of Jetztzeit, or “present-time,” as a critique of linear and progressive history, as well as Tony Bennett and his formulation of the “exhibitionary complex”, in which museums, worlds fairs, and commercial spaces emerge as devices for organizing and regulating knowledge and vision from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

Within this framework, the fragment of “storage” that appears in Mercancía (Goods)—as a cutout from a larger picture—seems to function as a miniaturization of Bennett’s “complex,” layered with other meanings. Could collage in your practice then be understood as a political strategy for intervening in these logics of temporality and display?

Sandra: I think the linear and progressive conception of history is an idea that works in the West, but does not necessarily fit other contexts. When the anachronism is not an exception but the very condition of things, linear time is insufficient for understanding social, cultural, and political processes.

By superimposing layers—sometimes obscuring, sometimes completing information—collage disrupts the homogeneous skin of painting and the idea of the finished image. It allows the image to be seen as one layer within a larger whole that can be disturbed; that which is fragile and constantly changing.

In Mercancía (Goods), the accumulation of cultural capital is accompanied by a newspaper clipping showing different commercial products being manufactured, transported, or displayed for sale. They do not merely share a formal resemblance; they belong to the same logic that assigns value to products regardless of the intentions and needs of those who produce them, or the places where they are made.

Ruth: I’m interested in the way you translate the idea of non-linear time into painting and into the unfinished image…

Sandra: Yes, the pictorial surface, thin and fragile, creates—through different tools such as perspective, color, and materiality—a reality far greater than itself. Even in abstract painting, that surface is capable of producing an entire universe that the viewer momentarily activates. The “finished” pictorial image erases its support and even turns it into part of the trompe-l’oeil, transforming it into a window, a frame, a door, and so on…

I’m interested in moments when the painter leaves the support and/or part of the process exposed, because it implies that trompe-l’oeil is no longer necessary to create that universe—perhaps because the viewer is already conditioned—thereby revealing the layers that constitute it and laying bare the process itself. I’m also interested in the mechanics, tools, and logics of restoration and conservation, because many of them ultimately “finish” the image as we know it. 

In my working process I deliberately employ those temporalities in which the past and future seem to collapse into a present that is not closed, a present that remains unfinished and invites participation. Today, new technologies and their almost-millimetric capacity to create copies and penetrate the visible surface of painting produce “images” that feel very close to mine. And although my paintings are certainly speculative, these technologies reveal information that exceeds what was originally meant to be seen. Those layers that once functioned as secret spaces are no longer secret.

Ruth: This leads me to ask how all of this translates into a pedagogical practice within painting. The way images are constructed is also directly connected to who created them and how they are composed, which in your work links form and concept very closely.

Last year you joined us as resident faculty at Skowhegan. In what ways are these processes of image-making present within art education? And how did you perceive the environment while you were there?

Sandra: I believe the transmission of the legacy of the painted image into contemporaneity can be traced across the different materialities of artistic practice. I don’t mean that it must become a central theme or even be formally recognizable, but I do think it is necessary to take responsibility for those inheritances, especially in moments of such polarization.

That legacy allows us to build bridges not only between the different cultures that inhabit us, but also between temporalities that appear sealed off from one another. The outdated ideas of free, neutral creation without inheritance is a form of escape forward that comes at a very high cost. Skowhegan, while being a place that allows you to step away from constructs you live with daily, which become invisible through habit, paradoxically enables those constructs to reappear. It allows you to confront them from other perspectives. At the same time, the diversity of the participants, on every level, creates a setting that forces you to reposition your own logics, certainties, and truths. My experience was as part of the faculty, but I can’t help wondering what my experience would have been like as a participant, and what might have changed in me had I encountered something like this thirty years ago!

Photographs courtesy the artist. Credit: Oak Taylor-Smith.