Robert Ortbal @ JAYJAY + Interview
By David Roth
Published Dec. 15, 2010
SquareCylinder.com
In an age when the virtual and the real are becoming increasingly intertwined, Robert Ortbal’s transformations of the everyday into the otherworldly seem like perfect evocations of this predicament. Crafted in a variety of media, the works range from gnarly and gangly to delicate and poetic. In many cases, you will not know what they are made of without touching them or being told. Thus, Styrofoam, Astroturf, steel, e-waste, wood and rubber pet toys become grist for objects that seem both strange and familiar. Re-purposed with resin, paint and flocking, they mimic a variety of man-made and natural forms.
The allusions produced by these visual sleights of hand include microscopic views of chemical reactions, deep-sea organisms, exotic plants, constellations and hybrid mash-ups of concepts that exist only in the artist’s imagination. That they call to mind things we know (or think we know) is merely a by-product of a working process that began some years back when the artist tried to envision what 2-D patterns might look like if they were translated to three dimensions. That investigation quickly led to something bigger: a search for essences. Not actual essences, as in molecular structures, but unfathomable things, like the physical structure of smells as they exist in psychological, emotional and sensory space.
The most radical example in Ortbal’s oeuvre is his longstanding Architecture of a Scent series — sculptures that attempt to give form to the state of sensory confusion known as synesthesia. The series began with spindly projections of wires festooned with Styrofoam balls, but has since evolved into objects of greater mass and proportion, such as Architecture of a Scent: Somewhere off the Coast of Davenport. It contains no visible remnants of the coastal hamlet north of Santa Cruz. What we get instead is an ungainly construction that looks like a series of exhaust pipes embedded in a coral reef. Mounted to a pinkish slab of weighty material that’s stained to resemble faux marble, the whole assemblage, which is attached to a hinge, can be swung from side to side, like a gate with a malignant growth.
In Oz, to take another example, a plastic container assumes the guise of a granite vessel sprouting a piece of molded resin. It looks like tree fungus. Arising from this protuberance is a miniature “broadcast tower” decorated with calculator keys. The object’s cavity contains pieces of Styrofoam carved to look like railroad spikes. Elsewhere in the show, which consists of eight sculptures and three intaglio prints, the artist uses Styrofoam and other synthetic materials to evoke jewel-encrusted treasures, aerial views of primordial landscapes, sea plants and floating cities.
While Ortbal, like many contemporary sculptors, uses everyday items and non-traditional art materials, his is a unique voice – one that’s pushing sculpture into the post-industrial future. While this work may at first register as a symptom of this confused, polymorphous state, the longer you look the more its insistent materiality begins to feels like the antidote to that condition – or, at the very least, a viable marker for what lies ahead.
Interview with Robert Ortbal
David M. Roth: When I look at your work, I always think that materials speak to you in the same way high-frequency sounds speak to animals: in them you “hear” things most of us can’t. Do materials, by themselves, suggest forms?
Robert Ortbal: Thanks, I like that metaphor. These days I seem to be a true omnivore when it comes to materials. Back when I was an undergraduate I worked almost exclusively in clay; but by the time I was in graduate school I was exploring all different kinds of materials and processes. Once I finished school, large-scale installations using domestic or household materials became my focus. To answer your question, sometimes materials suggest forms; but often they don’t. I wouldn’t want to be classified as a found object artist. I have always wanted to have a lot of latitude when it comes to developing my work. I spend a lot of time in the studio, so I want to have as much fun as I can in while still approaching the work in a serious and provocative way. Typically, I develop imagery and then search out the right materials and processes to get at what I want to say.
DR: You use things like flocking and resin very skillfully – not just to conceal the identity of your materials but to make them closely resemble things they are not. I’m thinking, specifically of Oz, where plastic hose has the color and texture of granite. I realize that the gulf between appearance and reality has always been central your work, but now I’m feeling as if you’ve taken it to a higher level.
RO: I have been interested, for a while now, in making work about things that are ineffable. I use a wide variety of materials and processes as a means to express things and spaces that are very difficult to talk about. In the past I have likened my materials to spores, which I can replicate and mutate into objects, inviting the audience to use their imagination: to see the Rococo as modern; packing foam as a petri-dish; rubber balls, wire and Styrofoam beads as a nervous system. Recently, I have started to juxtapose all of these domestic materials, gleaned from places like Dollar Store and Home Deport with organic materials and traditional sculpture supplies. When I bring them together, a new reality emerges and the sculptures begin singing their own shrill quirky songs.
DR: You’ve stated that you strive to give form to essences. But my sense is that for you, essence means something quite different from what it might mean for a scientist. Essence for you seems to be more about the nature of how we perceive rather than the actual properties of the thing being perceived. Care to comment?
RO: Yes, it is more like the way I imagine a poet trying to describe an object or a place. Although at times, since I am working with actual materials and the physical processes, there is a kinship with the scientists since we have to observe and pay close attention to what is really happening with the materials and objects and not get too lost in the theories and what I imagine the work is saying.
DR: Describe your working process.
RO: Oh boy…that’s difficult! (Long pause.) Often, it begins as a very simple sketch or short phrase jotted down in one of the many notebooks I keep and develop over time. Depending on when the entry goes into the notebook and what I am working on at the time, its gestation period can vary dramatically — from hours to years. I often rework and scour my notebooks at the beginning of a new cycle or when I get stuck on a particular work during the fabrication process. I certainly revisit them whenever I am about to begin an installation and when I go about titling the work. Next, depending on the idea entered into the notebook, I source the materials and begin fabrication. Occasionally, the process can be clean and neat and I proceed to the finish line in a timely manner. More likely, the piece evolves and at times even stalls only to later morph into something else. Sometimes I will recombine parts or materials from years past to make a work that gets at what I am searching for.
DR: Your work departs from any reality we know, yet it also seems well-grounded in things we do know – or things we think we know. Is that your intention, to operate in this gap?
RO: I have always been interested in exploring what is seen and unseen. A good example is my Architecture of a Scent series. That gap in the work and the awkward reality it portrays stems from the source of their construction being rooted in imagery that is equal parts real and imagined. I use this strange combination of the natural and the artificial to express the tensions that exist between the past and the future, technology and the body, the rational and the mystical and the individual and society.
DR: You mentioned Architecture of a Scent, a concept that involves giving form to smell: something that has no inherent shape. The title immediately calls to mind the sensory affliction known as synesthesia. How did you become interested in this?
RO: This is not something I believe I have or have ever studied. However, back in the ‘90s when I was making a lot of installation-based works, I was interested in making something that engaged more of the senses. I used scent in installations many times for its olfactory responses because I liked the way it can trigger memory so much faster than purely visual works. I even liked what it did for the work when the scent was only implied, like using cut onions. They could suggest tears and crying even though, phenomenologically speaking, they had begun to whither and dry out and had long since lost their actual power. So I guess the intermingling of sensory information these days comes more from my imagination. Again, it’s closer to poets’ methods and motives than to scientists’.
DR: People always liken your work to oceanic forms. Given the way a lot of it looks it seems impossible not to. Yet the association, at least from what you’ve said before, bothered you. Why?
RO: Well not always. I think it was more prevalent about five years ago when I was really interested in creating hybrids by crossing parts of the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms with certain sensibilities from the Rococo and Art Nouveau periods. During that time, the work, I agree, really spoke of oceanic forms. The coral-like forms, in particular, spoke beautifully to the nature of hybridization. Coral, which is really diverse order of the animal kingdom, is commonly mistaken for a plant, so when it came to creating hybrids, coral was an obvious choice. The oceanic association only bothered me when people stopped at this most obvious read of the work and didn’t take the time to see how it opened up into all the other associations I had built into the work.
DR: You’ve stated that you try to not create things from direct observation, but in this show there are at least two pieces that seem to have been directly inspired by observation. I’m thinking of Sometime around Sunset which strongly recalls the spires of Bryce Canyon, and Badlands, which resembles a piece of the Earth’s crust viewed from a high elevation. If so, does this represent a different working method? The pieces are quite unlike what I’ve seen from you in the past.
RO: The geography of Southern and Central Utah where Bryce Canyon is located has always had a very strong attraction for me. It is as if the flesh (i.e. the trees) has been scraped back to expose the bones of the place. Even the color of the rock has a way of changing my mood. When I drive out into the red rock I get more and more excited the closer and closer I get to such places. So yes, the works are certainly inspired by these places; however they are not based on direct observation of a specific geographic location. Instead, it’s is more like a distillation all of the canyons I have visited. Also, these works do represent a different method of working. They begin with subtraction, which is really a different sensibility from the collage and assemblage fabrication techniques I often use. I carved these forms from blocks of foam a year or two ago and then I put them away for awhile. Then, I covered them with layers and layers of resin and finally I surfaced them this summer and fall in time for the show.
What do you hope people get from looking at your work?
I like to leave people with questions –questions about what it means to be human.
