Object of the Week
April 24, 2015
Object of the Week: Taken Without Color
By: Hayden DeBruler ‘17
Food, water, life. There is something undoubtedly Orwellian about the Orta’s exhibit, the man-made nature of the structures. The metal pipes scaffold to the crown of coiled tubing, a route that arches up and over the center of Ortawater – Mobile Intervention Unit. Within the structure rest three cocoons that seem to be heaving in breath, the sterile nature of their life reaching beyond a medical fear and into the unknown, the future, a warning.
That, it seems, is the main project of the Orta’s sculptures, to warn the viewer. While addressing pressing issues such as borders, sustainable food and clean water outreach, their work utilizes the hermeticism of man-made structures to make the viewer uncomfortable, in search of an answer. They give it in small doses, an important component to each work whether it be the vegetables printed on glass, the wooden canoe, or the whisper that water will flow through the pipes, into the gallons. The Orta’s works take mechanized materiality and assert an unsettling human hand on it, through gloves reaching down their pieces, the sleeping bags that seem to breathe. Through food and water there is a hint at life, at something more unified, at reaching a home, within this world, which we have, ourselves, deconstructed.
Hayden DeBruler is from Greenville, South Carolina. DePauw Class of 2017, Creative Writing and Art History Major. She is a volunteer with the Peeler Art Center Galleries. The traveling exhibition, Infinite Mirror: Images of American Identity, will be on display through Friday, December 12, 2014.