PERIL

It is an act of imagination to locate peril in mute objects and frozen images. It is an act of self preservation in the face of potential harm. Accidents are caused by a lack of imagination: an inability to grasp the potency of objects and intentions.

In west Texas, two cities rise from the ancient seabed of the Permian Basin. The cities can be seen from miles away: they are the only disturbances on a perfectly flat horizon. From a long way off, the cities are stark and vertical, and they shimmer in the heat of the midday sun.

Those unfamiliar with the cities rarely think of one without the other: it isn’t Midland and Odessa, it’s Midland-Odessa. Midland-Odessa is oil country, a place of clear distinctions. Vertical buildings above horizontal earth. Figure and ground. The verticals in Midland are downtown skyscrapers, built with oil money. The verticals in Odessa are gas flares, burning over refineries on the outskirts of town.

Nathan Orosco was born and raised in Odessa. He is third-generation Mexican-American, his roots in Texas as deep as those of most of the Anglos. Growing up, he worked in his father’s repair shop, a laborer who fixed and painted the big rigs that service the oil fields. A laborer works while imagining the consequences of a slipping jack, a failed weld. A respirator protects lung tissue from the hot solvents in automotive paint.

What act of imagination provides protection from the peril of a routine traffic stop, or from a neighborhood blanketed with refinery fumes?

In his earlier installations of sculpture and video, Orosco’s labor imagined stripped-down shrines to a border experience. This was a minor alchemy, 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.

Peril is seductive: shards of mirror glitter; 9mm cartridges, each tipped with a glossy colored slug, ascend in a jagged line. They form a skewed heart-beat trace or a statistical graph. Peril is ambiguous: there is a tension between the clarity of recording every city in the Middle East by name and coordinates, and the confusion as to what we are to do with this information.

Imagination fails and we succumb to the unexpected: a punch in the face, or a spider’s bite.

—David Drake

Information from the venue’s website