Otero-Pailos Studio

Exhibited in 2016 at Westminster Hall, London, United Kingdom. 

Commissioned by Artangel.

In the permanent collections of the The Museum of London, The Ulster Museum in Belfast, The Whitworth in Manchester, the Kelvingrove / The People's Palace in Glasgow, the Museums Sheffield, and Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum.

At such a cataclysmic, troubling moment in British life, this lyrical pause for thought, about time and history, about human life — and death, of course — is hugely welcome. – Ben Luke, London Evening Standard

Commissioned by Artangel, The Ethics of Dust was installed in 2016 in the oldest existing building in the Houses of Parliament. Over 50 meters long, this cast of Westminster Hall's east wall contained hundreds of years of surface pollution and dust held captive in translucent latex.

Suspended from the roof and hung parallel to the east wall, the work was the result of a cleaning process in which latex was sprayed onto the walls of this UNESCO world heritage site, then peeled off, gently lifting dirt from the surface. Backlit and further illuminated by natural light from the hall's high windows, the amber glow of this sculptural installation commanded a moment of consideration for the what John Ruskin once called “that golden stain of time.”

The Ethics of Dust Westminster Hall, is the latest in a series of Bloomberg Philanthropies supported site-specific Artangel projects for London, which have included works by Richard Wentworth, Francis Alys, Steve McQueen and Paul Pfeiffer.

Exhibited in 2016 at the Museum of Yerba Buena in San Francisco, U.S.A.

Commissioned by YBCA.

The Ethics of Dust: Old United States Mint, San Francisco was commissioned by YBCA as part of its spring/summer 2016 exhibition, ‘SLOW DIALOGUES: Time, Space, and Scale,’ curated by Slow Research Lab, a research platform based in the Netherlands. It was created by artist and architectural preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos to raise awareness and encourage deeper reflection on one of humanity’s most neglected, and also most prolific, cultural products: pollution (“dust”).

Photographs: Charlie Villyard. Courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Exhibited in 2015 at La Galerie, Paris-Asnières, France. 

Commissioned by Louis Vuitton Private Museum.

In the permanent collection of Louis Vuitton.

This polyptych is a 7 piece dust cast of the main facade of the historic family home of Louis Vuitton. The dust casts reveal that some portions of the facade still retained layers of pollution from the 19th century. The work is in dialogue with Georges Seurat's famous Bathers at Asnières (1884), which depicts the same 19th pollution from this once industrial Parisian suburb, as the The Ethics of Dust. The inaugural exhibition at La Galerie was curated by Judith Clark.

Exhibited in 2015 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

Commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Presented as part of the exhibition "All of this belongs to you," The Ethics of Dust: Trajan’s Column interacts with the largest object in the museum. Using conservation latex, Otero-Pailos cleaned the hollow inside of the cast of Trajan’s Column, removing dust and dirt accumulated over decades in this usually unseen space. The result is giant latex ‘cast of a cast’ that is exhibited adjacent to the original, revealing the passage of time, and highlighting the Museum’s duty of care to the public collection. 
 

Exhibited at the Tin Sheds Gallery (Sydney,) and the Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York) in 2014.

Latex and pollution transferred from the ancient Roman silver mines of Carthago Nova (modern day Spain).

Ten panels of variable sizes

The bulk of the silver currency of the Roman empire was mined in New Carthage. The pollution from these mines is still traceable today in ice cores as far as Greenland.

Exhibited at the 53rd Venice Art Biennale in 2009.

In the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation T-BA21.

Latex and pollution transferred from the Doge's Palace (15th. c.)

12 m x 7 m

Exhibited at Manifesta 7 European Contemporary Art Biennial (2008). 

In the Collection of the Museion: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano, Italy.  

Latex and pollution transferred from Mussolini's Alumix Factory (1937)  

175 panels of 12 m x 12 m