Ruben Ochoa

Ruben Ochoa’s playful yet astute installation continues his exploration of the relationship between nature and the urban environment. Hung at curb-height, four close-up photographs of the roots of ficus trees—nonnative plants that routinely break up the sidewalks in LA—bear lighthearted titles such as Zoned Out in the 90045 and Still Tripping, 90033 (all works 2007). With their cracked, hastily patched squares of pavement and gnarled, scarred roots, the images document a conflict between the city and an enterprising transplant that has heartily adapted to (and transformed) its new home.

Displacement takes sculptural form in Infracted Expansion . . ., a broken sidewalk composed of wooden shipping pallets coated in cement and studded with trees whose naturalistic cement-and-wood bases abruptly give way to skeletal rebar trunks. Similarly unexpected, Lean Back is a trompe l’oeil sculpture of a pallet cast in concrete. This mixture and exchange of materials—wood for concrete, concrete for wood—suggests a fluidity between natural and mechanical processes. Ochoa blurs the boundaries further in a room completely filled with a three-dimensional rebar grid. Typically constructed as a support for poured concrete, the dense metal matrix is held together only by wires tied by hand. As such, it not only posits the room as a volume to be filled, turning negative into positive space, but also exposes the fragile, handmade framework beneath the concrete jungle, suggesting that the surfaces of the city are neither as fixed nor as impersonal as they look.