Studio Orta

After touring the USA, the Museum London, Ontario welcomes the triptych Food Water Life from August 29 to December 6, 2015. This final stop of the exhibition presents three major bodies of work that span close to two decades of collaborative work by Lucy + Jorge Orta. Through sculptures, drawings, installations, and video the artists explore major concerns that define the twenty-first century: biodiversity, environmental sustainability, climate change, and the social economy.

As heirs to the practice of social sculpture, formulated by the German artist and activist Joseph Beuys in the 1960s, the Orta’s works are relics of their own function—captivating assemblages such as the Processing Units and the Purification Factory are, respectively, a platform for the preparation of food and a mechanism to purify water. Other sculptures created as the result of the 2007 expedition to Antarctica, form part of a global effort to amend the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The featured works are metaphors-in-action, imaginative constructions that perform the tasks of which they are emblematic.

Food Water Life was initiated by the Tufts University Art Gallery in 2012, and is curated by curatorsquared. The exhibition toured to the Richard E. Peeler Art Center; Ben Maltz Gallery; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Zilkha Gallery.