Damián Ortega

Materia en Reposo II (Bresil) [Resting Matter II (Brazil)]

In Materia en Reposo II (Brasil), Damián Ortega documents private houses in Mexico caught in transition. The twenty images are arranged into a grid and each depicts modest single-level homes made of brick, cement, and terracotta tiles. These homes are all of a similar architectural style, however, the significant commonality for Ortega is the pile of bricks that accompany each home. Though these houses are complete in the sense that they’re habitable, they appear unfinished due to the piles of bricks stacked in anticipation of some undetermined future extension. They serve as a reminder of the individual components that make up a house and the physical labor required to turn a pile of bricks into a home. As such, this work is a representation of the artist’s longstanding interest in the politics of labor. But instead of focusing on the architectural results of physical labor, Ortega draws the viewer’s attention to what remains. The photographs document the various fashions and logistical approaches to shaping the stack of bricks by each individual owner; some stacks are meticulously organized, while others appear in disarray. Considering the potentiality of these objects is central to Ortega’s artistic strategy of working with raw and vernacular materials like corn, concrete, and clay, as well as composing and decomposing things, which establishes the artist as a metaphysician in the purest sense.