Raphael Montanez Ortiz is engaged by his complex Hispanic heritage and his formal experimentation with various forms of technology. In 1958, Ortiz was buying super-8 films (old movies, cartoons and newsreels) and re-editing the footage. Unlike his avant-garde contemporaries, Ortiz has placed ritual at the centre of his collage process. Ortiz used a tomahawk to chop up the ciine-artifacts of his ancestor's oppressors--Westerns and newsreels. The film fragments were then placed into a medicine bag, rattle and randomly re-edited into works such as Cowboy and Indian Film. More recently Ortiz has turned to laser discs to chop up and reconstruct film artifacts from classic cinema that encapsulate Euro-American readings of Western history. Ortiz has made dozens of these "digital/laser/videos" many of which were featured in the 1995 Whitney Biennal.

Artist Code: 487