Mario García Torres, Untitled, 2003–ongoing

Mario García Torres uses a variety of mediums, including film, sound, performance, “museographic installations,” and video. Often blurring original and reenactment, past and present, the artist’s work questions universal ideas about truth, certainty, and time. García Torres’s first US museum survey show, Illusion Brought Me Here, was organized by the Walker in 2018.

Like a library or archive, these ceramic dishes hold an inventory of colors used by Cerámica Suro, a workshop in Guadalajara, Mexico. As the pottery is made, artisans write their calculations for different glazes in pencil on leftover plates, using them as a kind of instruction notebook to formulate the shade and intensity of each color.

García Torres has a standing agreement with the workshop: they are to send him a plate or cup for each project they make, even if the original items were designed as a set of jars, a special commission, or other forms. By amassing the objects over time, the artist’s ongoing artwork can be seen as both a changing sculpture and an informal record of the workshop’s activities.