By Sarah McVean/reporter
Growing up working in his father’s oil rig repair shop in Odessa, Nathan Orosco relies on his roots to produce his artwork.
Orosco will talk about what inspires his work at his artist reception in the Lakeview Gallery on NW Campus Saturday, Nov. 3, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. during gallery talk at noon.
“ My work is a response to my landscape, culture [Mexican American] and social political anxieties,” he said. “My social political anxieties filter into the work because of my relation and continual interest with the Mexican laborer as an identity within the U.S. and its definition in our contemporary society.”
Juggling back and forth from Washington to Texas, Orosco has been exhibiting his work for the past seven years.
David Drake, friend of Orosco, said, “In his earlier installations of sculpture and video, Orosco’s labor imagined stripped-down shrines to a border experience.
This was a minor alchemy, Drake said, transmuting base materials (steel pipe, cast aluminum, grainy video shot with a small camera) into an outpost of the border, that place where shifting identities become momentarily fixed before slipping back into flux.
“ With this new work, what is imagined—what we are asked to imagine—is less specific,” he said.
Orosco has an MFA in sculpture and a BA in studio art and was an assistant professor of art at Western Washington University.
To learn more about him and his art, visit www.nathanorosco.com.
