Young Chang Marjetica Potrc takes a style...

Young Chang

Marjetica Potrc takes a style of living most of us don’t think

about, much less know about, and celebrates how resourceful and

brilliant people can be when put to the test.

Her aptly titled exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art,

“Extreme Conditions and Noble Designs,” centers around a large

structure, two objects and a series of urban images made into prints.

The show deals with themes of poverty, desperate shelter situations

and displacement.

The first object she has out is the Hippo Water Roller. It’s a big

blue barrel with two long beams on either side that stem upwards, so

you can hold the ends. You push it like you would a shopping cart.

Women in South Africa who live without running water use this to

sidestep the chore of having to carry liters of water on their heads.

The product, made and sold in South Africa, can carry up to 90

liters.

“It’s so amazingly simple,” exhibit curator Irene Hofmann said.

“But it improves the quality of life.”

And though the roller wasn’t intended to serve as protection

against land mines, it’s been shown to absorb and contain the shock

of an explosion, a discovery found after the device was accidentally

rolled over South Africa’s mine fields.

“I like to show objects that combine low and high tech ideas,”

said Potrc, who hails from Slovenia. “The co-habitation of local

solutions and high technology Self sufficiency, multiple use and

recycled materials -- I think that’s what’s relevant today.”

But the architecturally trained artist does more than just show

other people’s inventions. Along with her manipulated prints of what

we might typically assume are nuisance animals (bears in trash cans,

coyotes in office buildings), Potrc “re-interprets” buildings from

around the world and exhibits her work as art.

The piece at the museum reworks Mason’s Bend Community Center,

designed by architect Samuel Mockbee. The real center is in a

sprawling rural part of Alabama. It has been hailed for using

materials like car windows and wood instead of just standard building

elements. The many windows on the building make solar power a

possibility. For the community in which it sits, the center serves as

everything from a chapel to a stopping point for mobile businesses

including Meals-on-Wheels type programs, medical services and

educational programs.

“I thought this was fantastic,” the 49-year-old Potrc said of the

building’s varied uses. “I think individual initiative on private

space is something that’s happening today. So I’m just, in my work

through the language of architecture, showing what I think is

relevant for living in contemporary cities.”

The artist’s reinterpretation of the structure is a

floor-to-ceiling wooden piece with 24 car windows that are arranged

like roof shingles in angled layers.

“It’s in these things that she finds the creativity and the

initiative so beautiful and inspiring,” Hofmann said.

One of Potrc’s pieces, which was exhibited at the Guggenheim

Museum two years ago but is not part of the Orange County show,

showed what are called service core units. They are forms of

subsidiary housing provided by the South African government and

include just the basics: a slab of floor, a toilet and running water.

“It’s up to the people to improvise,” Hofmann said.

Potrc’s work, by its beauty, quietly comments on how high-rise

public housing and modern, more extravagant structures start to

marginalize people.

Among the artist’s prints is “24-Hour Ordinance,” which shows a

structure from Turkey built in 24 hours to comply with an ordinance

that states if you can build it in 24 hours and put a roof over the

whole thing in a day, the structure is legal.

“As a way of celebrating this, she built a structure in a gallery

in 24 hours,” Hofmann said. “She looks at those situations that can

be quite difficult.”

The second object in Potrc’s Orange County exhibit is the

Clockwork Mobile Telephone made by Motorola. It’s a Walkman-sized

gadget with what resembles a window handle on it. You plug it into

your cell phone and start cranking the thing up to begin charging.

Whether you’re stuck in the middle of urban California or in the most

remote part of the world, the device does just fine without

electricity.

“I was attracted to all these components of her work,” Hofmann

said. “Compelling issues that are global.”