Damian Ortega

    When we saw Black Watch at the Barbican Theatre, we also went to see Damian Ortega's exhibit The Independent.  Ortega is a Mexican artist who creates sculptures out of found objects, and his exhibit in the Barbican focused on turning the events of each day in the September 2010 newspaper into individual sculptures making a time period of that month.  The one sculpture I really liked was Waves IN and Waves OUT.  There were tires and drums arranged in increasing and decreasing circumference sizes that created a tunnel when you looked down the piece.  This was in response to an article about gravitational waves from September 20, 2010.  I liked this piece because of how its appearance changes when viewed at different angles and how you could walk through the separate tires and drums.  This piece had a lot of space to itself, however I did not think the space in The Curve worked well with the body of work as a whole.  I thought it was very scattered and the titles were hard to connect to the individual pieces since they were so far away on the wall and most pieces were installed in the center of the room.  I think a newspaper is generally very organized and his exhibit was not; I do not know if he wanted this aspect to relate to the layout of the newspaper or if he only desired the objects to relate to the content.  I did like that Ortega said in the newspaper handout this piece was about him becoming aware about what he was seeing and what it meant for contemporary culture.  I guess my response to the work is that different people respond quite differently to the exact same events, and this exhibition was about Ortega's "own subjective viewpoint" during the month of September of 2010.