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Ted Ormai – United States of America

Visual Artist

I’m Ted Ormai from Pennsylvania, U.S.A. I am an artist who works with magnets and creates visual effects. Magnetism is inspiration, a material, and a subject matter in the pieces that I have done. I use iron base materials, metallic paints, and iron particles and create images moving the paint, separating different colors, and using this prime force in nature, so this is natural, a lot of circular patterns and distorted spheres. Currently I have been working on curved surfaces, some that I bent myself and recently I’ve started working on satellite receiving dishes that are from our age.

A lot of devices that we have today in our technology are based on magnetism—motors, computer parts, television, different parts of the magnetic spectrum that are beyond what is visible to our eyes but with different devices that have been developed we are able to see beyond our normal senses . Using the material and the subject matter led into using satellite receiving dishes, which are now ending up as today’s junk, I mean already things have moved to the point that this stuff is readily available and working in spaces that are allegedly curved, we don’t live on a flat plane. Everything has dimensions so I am expressing that in some dimensional things and actually using curved surfaces that you can see hopefully into other dimensions.

The magnetism separates materials depending upon their susceptibility--some of them are more, attracted or repelled. The magnets have a positive and negative pole so they are pushing the paint away--the metallic iron-based pigments; they are pushing them away or attracting them, separating them into these circular patterned forms that look like things in the universe because they are the same forces that create the universe.

The paint that I use has different forms of iron, oxides and specular hematite, These are natural products and are used in paints to create iridescence and interference and as light hits them, it breaks down the spectrum and you get all these different sparkly effects that are arranged by the magnetism. So I am participating in the process and the magnets are also ordering the material.

A lot of them can be symbolic of either , they are all not all perfectly round, so that some are moved into oval shapes, so that some can be construed as an eye or even an ear the satellite receivers are like ears listening to signals that are bounced and relayed off the satellites. Some of the ones I use actually have been used to receive messages from space.

Some of the other materials that I use include mica, which is a silicate, highly reflective and that is usually mixed in with iridescent paints. That is what gives them the sparkle. It is not magnetic but as magnetic materials move around, the mica aligns also.

I learn as I go along. Other things I read on the Internet, and then I apply that to what I’ve learned and find materials that respond to the magnetism. Mostly I use iron oxide, but I’ve also used gold, real gold, in my pieces so some of it is very precious material and some of it is just iron ore and dirt. So the pieces have these earth colors that sparkle of the hematite then pure gold.