When grappling with loss during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, artist Karl Orozco had nothing to say.
“I knew that I could reflect that moment through absence, and that would be more powerful than putting anything on a platform,” Orozco said.
After moving to Albuquerque from New York City in summer 2020 to teach art at the Albuquerque Academy, Orozco found himself not only wrestling with his role as an artist during a global tragedy, but with being placed in a starkly different environment than where he had begun his professional career.
Craving a new beginning in his creative work, Orozco wanted to change his practice to reflect his surroundings. This prompted the beginnings of his most recent body of work, “Signs of Life.”
The project began as a singular photograph of an abandoned billboard. To Orozco, it stood as a monument in the Southwest’s quiet urban landscape and a reminder of the life that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic. Orozco parallels this quietness to the use of the Southwestern landscape in numerous movies depicting post-apocalyptic worlds with scattered signs of human life.
“For me, I’m interested in the fact that there’s an absence in messaging, and it still reads as a monument. It still reads as an object that people can recognize,” he said.
After photographing his first sign, Orozco started compiling and documenting abandoned signage across the city, creating maps and lists of where each sign was located along with a photo of the site.
As the collection grew, he experimented with different mediums to express the visual data he collected. After finding that a print format made the project feel too static, Orozco put the images through Blender, a 3D computer graphics software.
“When I started working with the signs in Blender, it took on this note rather than ‘Oh, how sad it is for this object to be here and out of use,’” Orozco said. “It instead became ‘It’s here, it’s in this state currently and it won’t be forever.’”
“Signs of Life” is now a video exhibition on display at Albuquerque’s Sanitary Tortilla Factory, a community art space downtown. Visitors can view the exhibition until Oct. 25. Orozco hopes viewers take their time with the exhibit, reflecting its meaning onto their own experiences.
“I want the installation to be meditative. I want it to be a space for contemplation. I want it to be a space that is invoking a mirror between two worlds,” Orozco said.
Isaac Suarez Flint is a freelance reporter and photographer for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @dailylobo
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