Knife on Table

With studios in Mexico City, New York, and Paris, Gabriel Orozco is a peripatetic artist whose work fluidly crosses traditional boundaries between photography, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Since the 1980s he has used the camera to document his own ephemeral sculptures (a pile of sand on a table, a shoebox in the snow, clay bearing the imprint of his hand) as well as to record the unexpected beauty of found objects or situations-like the half-moon sweep of a dog's tail on a sandy concrete floor.
Orozco uses photography to encourage an attitude of heightened awareness in the viewer. As the artist put it in an interview, "What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again." Orozco's photographs are beautiful, but even more remarkable are the regenerating effects they have on our perception-how they enrich our subsequent encounters with reality, the ways they open our eyes to what is already there.