In this preview from the “Mexico City” episode of Season 8 of “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” artist Damián Ortega reflects on the process and inspiration behind his 2007 installation “Controller of the Universe.” “The idea, for me, was to permit the audience to come inside of the piece and feel how many possibilities,” says the artist, “and how we see everything through tools.”
Damián Ortega uses objects from his everyday life—Volkswagen Beetle cars, Day of the Dead posters, locally-sourced corn tortillas—to make spectacular sculptures which suggest stories of both mythic import and cosmological scale. In many of the artist’s sculptures, vernacular objects are presented in precise arrangements—often suspended from the ceiling or as part of mechanized systems—that become witty representations of diagrams, solar systems, words, buildings, and faces. These shifts in perception are not just visual but also cultural, as the artist draws out the social history of the objects featured in his sculptures, films, and performances. The intellectual leap between recycled quotidian objects and complex systems of thought is what lends Ortega’s work a humble yet profound poesis.
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Learn more about the artist at:
http://www.art21.org/artists/damian-ortega
Watch the FULL EPISODE online (http://www.art21.org/videos/episode-mexico-city) or from PBS streaming apps (http://www.pbs.org/anywhere).
Season 8 of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” premiered Friday, September 16, 2016 at 9:00 p.m. on PBS. “Mexico City” aired Friday, September 16 at 10:00 p.m.
Learn more about Season 8 at:
http://www.art21.org/season8
