|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
featured artists
Damían Ortega
|
biography
(b.Mexico City, Mexico, 1967).
Damian Ortega desires to alter the syntax of everyday objects and their signification. He utilizes items such as golf balls, tortillas, bricks or pick-axes and then deconstructs the mechanisms by which they are interpreted. He alters them, creating hybrid forms, in order to reveal various symbolic components. He redefines the way a viewer interprets the world. The artist and his art question objects repeatedly in order to undermine fixed notions about them. In his installation piece Power Rangers, 2001, Ortega transformed a Mexican monument into a giant Power Ranger. He previously placed a commemorative monument on wheels (Obelisco con Rueditas, 1996), and created a model for modern sculpture (Vision Simultanea, 1991-1999) by lining up supermarket trolleys according to the dynamics of movement. His work includes an abstract sculpture made out of tortillas and Latrina America, which consists of a toilet with the seat in the shape of South America. The artist has received the Jovenes Creadores FONCA as well as the Torino Prize from the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per L’Arte, in Turin, Italy. Ortega’s work has recently (2001) been shown internationally at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, and the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. His upcoming exhibits, 2002, include the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Gwanju Biennale in South Korea.
|
back to artists
|
|
|
