Rolling Life's Hand Line

Gabriel Orozco

2003 · Chromogenic print · Photographs

Orozco makes ephemeral sculptures-sand on a table, a shoebox in snow, clay bearing the imprint of his hand-that are given longer life through photography. Whether recording one of his own interventions in the landscape or a found situation, his photographs remind us of the fleeting beauty to be found in simple things and chance occurrences if we only open our eyes and minds. This image of a potato beetle curled in the palm of a hand is characteristic of the artist's photographic work: his subjects are frequently seen in close-up and centered in the frame, which also paradoxically subjects them to sometimes dizzying shifts in scale and perspective. Like his famous early sculpture Yielding Stone (1992)-a Plasticine ball shaped and marked by the artist rolling it in the street-Orozco's photographic subjects seem to exist somewhere between the organic and the handmade and, by extension, at the precise point where imagination and reality intersect.

Artist

Gabriel Orozco

Date

2003

Medium

Chromogenic print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Anonymous Foundation and Charina Foundation Inc. Gifts, 2004