NARRATOR:  

Artist Maria Porges talks about her work. 

MARIA PORGES: 

Why Are We Like Our Parents is a piece from a series that refers to museums. Museums as a place where we store memories in the form of artifacts. And where we pose questions to which either there is no answer or we really don’t know what the answer is. 

So I originally made a group of pieces called 20 Questions which I think of as the 20 questions to which there are no answers. 

Questions like, Where Does Dust Come From, or When do We Need to Be Loved, or in the case of this piece, Why Are We Like Our Parents.  

The wax bottles are stand-ins for the different possible parts of the answer to that question. I always try to choose the correct size of bottle to represent how important that particular solution might be. Which is probably why Forgetfulness is such a large, prominently placed vessel. 

The bottles are cast in beeswax or synthetic wax…it’s translucent, almost like flesh, and also it makes a reference to wax museums and also medical waxes.  

Whenever you see a bottle I think in a painting or in a sculpture, it makes some kind of reference to the body itself. I mean they’re containers. So as containers they refer to both your mind as a container for information and to the body as a container for physical memory. 

It’s sort of like looking into somebody’s mind. I am really interested in what happens where words and pictures or words and objects come together. Because I believe that their expressive potentials are very different and that together they do something that they can’t accomplish apart.