Damián Ortega takes things apart to make amazing art
New ICA exhibit about creative destuction and destructive creation
In most art exhibits you aren’t given the opportunity to see the steps of the creative process played out. Instead we’re presented with a completed piece removed by time and space from the vitality that went into its making.
With Mexican artist Damián Ortega it’s easy to imagine, because his work is about process itself. Not the artistic process per se, but processes in general. Many of the sculptures, installations, photographs and videos on display in his first major exhibition “Do It Yourself” at the Institute of Contemporary Art either hint at or hit you over the head with the idea of how things are made, and how each individual component of an object interacts with its other components to make the whole. That concept is writ large in the centerpiece of the show “Cosmic Thing” a deconstructed VW Beetle suspended from the ceiling in its individual parts. It’s also played out literally in a video installation titled “Liquid Center” in which Ortega deliberately dissects a golf ball revealing its surprising contents.
It’s also played out literally in a video installation titled “Liquid Center” in which Ortega deliberately dissects a golf ball revealing its surprising contents.
That curiosity about the inner-workings of objects is something he learned as a child growing up in Mexico, he told us. “My brother is responsible. He was the destroyer in the house. He was even more curious than me, opening things from the kitchen. I really enjoyed these moments.”
It’s a metaphor that can be extrapolated to the interactions between individuals as the part of sociological groups. “This is a system,” he said, referring to “Cosmic Thing.” “If you open it you can classify and understand the singularity and the dignity of each piece. It could be a city, or a mechanism, or a family or everything.”
The “dignity of each piece,” whether it be the mechanics of a car, a jumble of leather strips dangling from the ceiling that also make up the floor plan of a series of apartment buildings in the piece “Skin” or the interaction of building bricks arranged in cascading domino formations in the films “Nine Types of Terrain” is central to Ortega. “The object when it’s in function is just a system of functions. Now you can see here it’s a system of communications.”
Putting across a view point through bold, broad statements is something he developed in his former career as a political cartoonist. A field not renowned for its subtlety. “I don’t know if these are subtle,” he laughed, gesturing to his work. The difference now, he said, is that instead of cartoons, which sometimes are only supposed to exist for one day, “the art is something to work for a hundred years. Maybe more.”
Boston Metro
Damián Ortega: ‘Do It Yourself’
Through Jan. 18
ICA
200 Northern Ave., Boston
MBTA: Silver Line to Courthouse
www.icaboston.org
With Mexican artist Damián Ortega it’s easy to imagine, because his work is about process itself. Not the artistic process per se, but processes in general. Many of the sculptures, installations, photographs and videos on display in his first major exhibition “Do It Yourself” at the Institute of Contemporary Art either hint at or hit you over the head with the idea of how things are made, and how each individual component of an object interacts with its other components to make the whole. That concept is writ large in the centerpiece of the show “Cosmic Thing” a deconstructed VW Beetle suspended from the ceiling in its individual parts. It’s also played out literally in a video installation titled “Liquid Center” in which Ortega deliberately dissects a golf ball revealing its surprising contents.
It’s also played out literally in a video installation titled “Liquid Center” in which Ortega deliberately dissects a golf ball revealing its surprising contents.
That curiosity about the inner-workings of objects is something he learned as a child growing up in Mexico, he told us. “My brother is responsible. He was the destroyer in the house. He was even more curious than me, opening things from the kitchen. I really enjoyed these moments.”
It’s a metaphor that can be extrapolated to the interactions between individuals as the part of sociological groups. “This is a system,” he said, referring to “Cosmic Thing.” “If you open it you can classify and understand the singularity and the dignity of each piece. It could be a city, or a mechanism, or a family or everything.”
The “dignity of each piece,” whether it be the mechanics of a car, a jumble of leather strips dangling from the ceiling that also make up the floor plan of a series of apartment buildings in the piece “Skin” or the interaction of building bricks arranged in cascading domino formations in the films “Nine Types of Terrain” is central to Ortega. “The object when it’s in function is just a system of functions. Now you can see here it’s a system of communications.”
Putting across a view point through bold, broad statements is something he developed in his former career as a political cartoonist. A field not renowned for its subtlety. “I don’t know if these are subtle,” he laughed, gesturing to his work. The difference now, he said, is that instead of cartoons, which sometimes are only supposed to exist for one day, “the art is something to work for a hundred years. Maybe more.”
Boston Metro
Damián Ortega: ‘Do It Yourself’
Through Jan. 18
ICA
200 Northern Ave., Boston
MBTA: Silver Line to Courthouse
www.icaboston.org
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