This incredible picture was just tweeted out by @GalleryatGrays. It's an image of Damien Ortega's "Controller of the Universe," on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art's Glass Box gallery until September 29.
Because my description — "Where's Magneto?" — might not cut the scholarly mustard, here's the museum's official literature on the piece(s).
Ortega works in different media, focusing on everyday objects and materials—from bricks and glass to pick-axes and tortillas—playing with and revealing their sometimes hidden, sometimes forgotten, and often neglected contexts of usage and meaning. Through the way the work is installed—with its parts that seem propelled outward from an invisible center into the surrounding space—each tool becomes one element of a bigger event. Each tool is a fascinating and threatening element in an orchestrated explosion that metaphorically connects to ideas of creation, formation, and destruction.
Ortega was born in Mexico in 1967 and arrived on the art scene with his piece Cosmic Thing at a Venice festival in 2003. That work consisted of a deconstructed Volkswagen Beetle suspended from the ceiling, which I guess was not only "fascinating and threatening" but also a comment on Mexican consumer culture. Ortega now resides in Mexico City after a lengthy stint in Berlin.
Go check this thing out. Just don't touch.
