Orange County
Museum of Art
image:
Hippo Water Rollers, Photo courtesy Grant Gibbs and the Hippo Water
Roller Project
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Marjetica
Potrc
Extreme Conditions and Noble Designs
September 22, 2002 March 2, 2003
Orange County Museum of Art
850 San Clemente Drive
Newport Beach, California 92660
Information: (949) 759-1122
Press Office: (949) 759-1122 ext. 207
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The Orange County Museum of Art is pleased to announce the first West
Coast exhibition of work by Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc.
Sometimes
described as an "urban anthropologist," Potrc creates works that
introduce
sobering observations about the unsettling dichotomies of contemporary
urban life through forms inspired by shantytowns, favelas, and
other
improvised cities and ad hoc dwellings around the world. Using
inexpensive or salvaged building materials, Potrc's central works take
the
form of structures based upon buildings created by disenfranchised
people
living in the most impoverished and undeveloped parts of the world's
growing cities. These works celebrate the resourcefulness and creativity
of initiatives that challenge ownership of land or the official
organization of a city, articulating Potrc's belief in the aesthetic and
political power that the most marginalized people of a society can
create
through individual initiative.
While the sources of most of Potrc's structures are anonymous dwellings
built by untrained architects and individuals around the world, the
inspiration for her new installation for OCMA's exhibition is the work
of
celebrated American architect Samuel Mockbee (1944-2001), who, along
with
his architecture students at Auburn University's Rural Studio, designed
and built homes and community buildings for impoverished residents of
Alabama's Hale County. Resulting from an improvisatory spirit and
collaborative and cooperative process, Mockbee's low-cost and often
self-sustainable buildings are models of social and civic engagement. In
Mockbee and the Rural Studio, Potrc has found a shared affinity for
creating small but meaningful gestures that encourage individual
empowerment and self-reliance. Potrc's new structure is named after
Mason's Bend Community Center, a remarkable Rural Studio building in a
remote, undeveloped area along Alabama's Black Warrior River. Potrc's
structure inspired by this building quotes its striking form, its use of
salvaged materials such as car windows, and its proposed future addition
of solar power, celebrating the building's character of inventiveness
and
self-sufficiency.
In addition to a recent series of prints exploring housing strategies
around the world, Extreme Conditions and Noble Designs includes
a few
objects from the world of industrial design as further examples of human
initiative, creativity, and self-reliance. "Inventions that I find
most
inspiring are about urgent needs," Potrc has written of the objects
that
she often exhibits with her prints and structures. The Hippo Water
Roller,
which was developed in South Africa to aid remote African villages in
the
collection and transportation of drinking water, is such an invention.
This simple object-which might be described as a cross between a
shopping
cart and a plastic barrel-has dramatically increased the amount of water
an individual can transport from a water source while decreasing the
time
and physical strength needed. In addition to allowing more time in a day
for such critical activities as farming, the Hippo Water Roller has the
added benefit of offering its user protection from land mines. Filled
with
up to 90 liters of water, the roller can actually absorb much of a land
mine's blast as its owner pushes it along the landscape. Characteristic
of
the objects Potrc includes in her exhibitions, the Hippo Water Roller
represents a noble design that can bring one of life's basic needs to
people in the most remote parts of the world.
http://www.potrc.org
Marjetica Potrc: Extreme Conditions and Noble Designs is part of
Orange
County Museum of Art's Installation Series, an exhibition series
specifically devoted to the presentation of installation-based work. The
Installation Series reflects both the local and the global,
engaging some
of the most vital and promising artists working locally, nationally, and
internationally.
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