Curator, Ann Temkin: There’s a great sense of efficiency in Orozco’s work. For me, there’s never anything extra. And, if anything, he’s doing what he does with less than you would have thought possible. He has an attitude of traveling lightly through the world, And being a light traveler means that you don’t have a lot of possessions or equipment, or paraphernalia that is essential to how you live, or where you live. I think that’s mirrored in his work, which needs very little to, make it.
Artist, Gabriel Orozco: Perhaps this is the first work I made using the phone book. I was looking at this
object, so impersonal, but everybody is there, listed and is the representation of the whole city. And, my girlfriend at the time--now my wife--her name is Maria.
So I took one of these pages and I erase all the last names, and numbers just leaving as a kind of sound, or an echo her name. So when you get to this, you just see Maria, Maria, Maria.
I guess is like if everybody else in the city was just a background and the only person, that has that name is the only person you are aware of it and the rest is just more like a phantom, or like a texture or a cloud or something.
Ann Temkin: It’s a fantastic combination of something, which is totally manufactured impersonally, and anonymously, and he turns that into something which is really a love letter. These polarities that come together in the work are really a key to its, profundity, I think.