My work is primarily concerned with the reconciliation of growth and ruin—opposing yet inseparable forces that define natural and man-made systems. The sprawling constructions that inhabit my large-scale drawings weigh utilitarian geometry against wild, organic forms. As layers of ink accumulate, others are subtracted in a simultaneous act of writing and erasure, violence and restraint. With progress of technology comes degeneration, particularly in language. The culture of the Internet has compressed complex structures of communication into an immediate vocabulary of commands, fundamentally altering the aesthetics of human interaction. To this end I distress words, images, and the machines that create them through over-use, repetition, and manipulation. Nondescript landscapes and maps are filtered through a printer drained of toner or a photocopier, resulting in a striated spectrum of twitching fluorescents or a low- fi black-and-white translation. My practice is largely motivated by
the power this generation has to unite the disparate future that lies ahead. Where past and future—obsolescence and over-saturation—are
nearly conflated, value is placed on facsimile and dispensability, and faith is consistently challenged.
Born in Medellin, Colombia in 1979, Ochoa currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Ochoa's work has been exhibited in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and Denver, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado.
|
