Paola Ochoa in her Bushwick Studio. — Photos by Mimi Luse
Inspired by the visual language of nature and of the internet, the artist Paola Ochoa synthesizes external stimulus into intricate multi-planar works. Fixated on the future; much of her work entertains futuristic visions, fantasies, and apocalyptic scenarios.
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Nature’s demise, and the possibility that our generation will be one of the last to enjoy the natural world is something that pre-occupies her as an artist. In the conversations I had with her, nature and its resources were always a tenuous, temporary thing that could be taken away from us at a moment’s notice and replaced with something computerized.
By extension, Ochoa is interested in how we use the computer now to mediate nature. "If I wanted to draw a tree, I don’t go outside, I go online and get a Google image. But what if we don’t have trees one day? Our references will be pixelated. I’m interested in our way of translating nature." An immigrant to the states from Colombia at age 11, the act of translating from one language to another is a central concept to her work, and a concept she has carried her entire life. She points to a large-scale drawing called Branches on her wall. Its subject, tree branches, is unruly, but her composition and her handling is methodical and contained, blocked out in immaculate pencil strokes. She explains, "When I work on these kinds of drawings, my hand moves like a printer’s cartridge." Replicating the binary patterns and the production methods of digital media, Ochoa plays with how we "see" nature now that we are wired humans.
Trained in digital and analog animation at the Rocky Mountain College of Art in Colorado, she has an animator’s approach to drawing, putting massive amounts of effort into pieces that imbue a fluent and natural movement. Two oversized pieces that were in her studio, Citysteps and Slightly All the Time each took her approximately six months to complete. Different from her graphite works, these finely tuned ink drawings are infinitesimally complex and, like the works of drawers like Julie Mehretu, integrate ephemera and icons from sundry sources. Ochoa loved the arid stony topography of Colorado, and wind-smoothed mountain ridges or what seem to be the interiors of cave formations manifest themselves in her pieces. In these ink compositions, inspiration taken from her own geographical exploration fuses itself with pixilated icons and symbols found during web crawls. Fractal patterns, ruling both the natural and digital world, seem to hold a special fascination for her. Her wide interests make her subject matter massive in scope; she’s interested in the macro and the micro; and portraying all of those at once in a desire to capture the miasma of images that we humans encounter on a daily basis.
Though she is a skilled draftsperson, her practice is as wide-ranging as her interests. She showed me some beautiful conceptual sculptures that she is working on. For Clean Coal, Ochoa riffs on a politically charged election-season keyword by painting pieces of coal with a glittery coat of sparkle paint. As pretty and irresistible as candies, she uses the poetics of marketing to "correct" the appearance of a natural resource that our nation has a sweet tooth for. Complex in their arrangements and political in an unobtrusive way, Ochoa’s sculptures are similar in tenor to the works of Félix González Torres, whom she admires very much, having grown up in Miami next to one of his large billboard works.
Finally, Ochoa showed me a video she made, and here is her technical forte. She has already had solo shows at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art showcasing this aspect of her work. In the newest one, called "Holy Land," Ochoa filmed one of her own potted plants, a Mimosa Pudica, or "sensitive plant" and sets it to a rhythm to evoke ideas about cultural land claims and ownership in politically troubled areas. The plant in her video is abstracted into a meditative pattern.
The regular repetition of shapes echo in her drawings as well, and pattern usage in religious art and in the woven "eye dazzler" tapestries of Navajo American Indians are another one of Ochoa’s fascinations, relating again to issues of translation. She explains, "These patterns are interesting not because they are decorative; they are actually a language. Really minimal patterns have narrative qualities — not language of glyph but a story, that can be read immediately."
Other than the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Ochoa has also shown her work in Los Angeles and Miami. She also has an online photo project.
