Ortbal’s Eccentric Behaviors

Ortbal Cover
Artist: Robert Ortbal

Cover Photographer: Edgar Zhang
Artist Costume: Robert Ortbal

Edgar Zhang wrote(Clip):

This is what all of Ortbal’s visitors do. The Samaritans in their traveling cases make the ordinary objects around them, a smooth flat stone, a scrap of fabric, a tiny figure in a suit, look like artifacts from a world worth examining. The bunny heads at the Crocker did not transport the parents who wore them to somewhere else; they transformed the museum they were already standing in, made it a place where the usual rules had been suspended, where a sixty-year-old stranger could become the most interesting person in the room. The astroturf suit on a bicycle in Davis was not about departure, it was an elegy for someone who had traveled those same streets and was gone, it’s a way of returning to familiar ground and finding it charged with loss and memories.

And in each case, the visitor does something else: it makes the people watching visible to each other. The parent who puts on the mask and finds their child suddenly, unexpectedly laughing at them. The strangers who bonded years later over a shared memory of bunny heads, having never recognized one another inside them. The shopper in Emeryville who stopped mid-stride, bewildered, and reached for their phone — not to document the figure, but because something in them needed to tell someone else: you have to see this. The visitor is a mirror as much as they are a traveler. It passes through and, in passing, shows people where they are and who is next to them.