From June 4 to August 20, 2002, Jaipur Kites, a video by the internationally recognized Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco (b. Jalapa, 1962) will be presented in the Video Gallery (179) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Shot during a 1998 visit to India, Jaipur Kites focuses on the annual kite festival in Jaipur, when colorful kites crowd the sky above the chaotic city, transforming life there for a day. In this twenty-nine minute video Orozco brings the same sensibility to his videos as he does to his sculpture, photographs and drawings.
Orozco finds his vocabulary within everyday situations, and has often been inspired by the recorded unfamiliar, ephemeral juxtapositions that he discovers in the course of his travels to different cities around the world. The artist has described his videotapes as offering a window onto his "paths of thought." The kite shapes that captivated him in Jaipur exist in other of his works, most prominently in the sculpture Black Kites (1997) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico in 1962, Orozco is based in New York City. He has exhibited throughout the world, including a 1999 Museum Studies installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a major exhibition at the Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1998, and a retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in summer 2000.