Damián Ortega

(Born in 1967 in Mexico City, Mexico)

This work is not currently on view.

Olympus, 2009
Two metal structures, twenty-six plastic sheets holding a sectioned photographic camera 24 ¾ x 83 1/8 x 19 7/8 in. (63 x 211 x 50.5 cm)
Gift of Mark and Marie Schwartz
2010.1

Olympus exemplifies Ortega’s interest in how things work, his playful exploration of mechanisms and systems from biology to politics, and his focus on the relationships of individual parts to the whole. Ortega disassembles an Olympus 35-mm camera, then suspends its parts in a series of parallel plastic sheets, evoking slides under a microscope. Olympus’s analog camera, almost a relic in our digital age, is a tool that captures the present while belonging to the past.

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