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When Liliana Porter came to Flatbed’s studios in 2008, she developed nine, polymer photogravures. Working with a theme based on her photographs of ceramic and wax, dog figurines, she composed some as single images, and in two prints, combined the lens-based images of the dogs with human figures.
In Situation with a Dog, she displays her fey approach to the subject as well as her sense of irony. She posed the image of the ceramic dog’s head so that it is staring at a tiny, plastic, three-dimensional figure that she adhered to the paper on its left. Her dog’s portrait is an index of a sculptural tchotchke that is an index of an actual dog, thus removing the image two steps away from its source. Her three-dimensional figure is doubly distanced from its source by virtue of its minuscule scale. This sort of conceptual playfulness and intellectual gamesmanship is typical of the artist’s work in various media and places her work solidly within the conceptual mode of working that has been a continuing part of American art since the 1970s
