Director, Glenn Lowry: Gabriel Orozco.
Artist, Gabriel Orozco: In a town called Cholulah, like an hour away from Mexico City, it is this famous town for making all the bricks, and it’s beautiful the landscape, with all this brick ovens, made out of bricks. They look a little bit like pyramids. They are very nice.
My Hands Are My Heart is a work that is made out of clay from this classic material for brick making, and instead of the mold, I’m using my hands as a mold. I think in my work the idea of receptacle, or the idea of the recipient is important. And in this case, the photography of the work represents both the area of containing the clay between the hands and opening up and having that space in between.
GLENN LOWRY: Curator Ann Temkin.
ANN TEMKIN: This is very telling in regard to Orozco’s interest in putting himself into his work in a very subtle way, because we have these references to the maker of this work, as a being, but it’s a very different kind of thing from any sort of expressive selfportraiture.
In terms of the photographs, he was not interested in making them into fancy prints that would have some kind of specialized dimension or surface. So they’re really clearly documents as ordinary, in a way, as the lump of clay, and it really echoes his process with materials in wanting to be straight forward and not wanting to be fancy.