Rolling Life's Hand Line

Orozco makes ephemeral sculptures-sand on a table, a shoebox in snow, clay bearing the imprint of his hand-that are given longer life through photography. Whether recording one of his own interventions in the landscape or a found situation, his photographs remind us of the fleeting beauty to be found in simple things and chance occurrences if we only open our eyes and minds.
This image of a potato beetle curled in the palm of a hand is characteristic of the artist's photographic work: his subjects are frequently seen in close-up and centered in the frame, which also paradoxically subjects them to sometimes dizzying shifts in scale and perspective. Like his famous early sculpture Yielding Stone (1992)-a Plasticine ball shaped and marked by the artist rolling it in the street-Orozco's photographic subjects seem to exist somewhere between the organic and the handmade and, by extension, at the precise point where imagination and reality intersect.