Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms

Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms is a two-part sculptural and photographic installation comprising thousands of items of detritus he gathered at two sites--a coastal wildlife reserve in Baja California, Mexico, and a playing field near his home in New York City. The first component of the installation, Sandstars, draws on the voluminous amounts of waste deposited on the shores of the wildlife reserve by Pacific currents. Orozco’s monumental sculptural carpet of nearly 1,200 objects is accompanied by 12 large-scale gridded photographs of the individual objects in a studio setting, organized typologically by material, color and size. An additional grid documents the landscape from which the objects were retrieved, along with incidental compositions made in situ from the castaway items. The second component, Astroturf Constellation, also explores taxonomic classification, but on a completely different scale. It comprises a collection of miniscule bits of debris--again numbering around 1,200 items--left behind by athletes and spectators in the Astroturf of a playing field in New York City. As with Sandstars, the objects are displayed alongside 13 photographic grids. This volume highlights Orozco’s subtle practice of subjecting the world to personal, idiosyncratic systems while invoking several of the artist’s recurrent motifs, including the effects of erosion, the poetry of the mundane, the relationship between the macro and the micro and the tension between nature and culture.