DANIEL JOSEPH MARTINEZ
How I Fell In Love With My Dirty Bomb
(Opium des Volks)
FLESH EATING PROSTHETIC
(Phagocitage des prostheses)
© 2006, Daniel Joseph MARTINEZ / Courtesy LAXART
LAXART a new nonprofit contemporary arts organization founded on 2005 and located at 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles in a new space designed by LA based architect Peter Zellner. Its inaugural exhibition features new work by Los Angeles based artist DANIEL JOSEPH MARTINEZ who launches the new space with a series of site-specific interventions including a text painted on the façade of the building, video, photography and sculpture.
Daniel Joseph Martinez has been instrumental in informing discourses on identity in America through the vehicle of painting, video, sculpture and public works. Martinezs recent work negotiates politics and poetics, largely through the lens of minimalism. His proposed multimedia project for LAXART speaks to empire, modernism and difference, yet is rooted in a highly formal language, which examines vulgarity, beauty and the sublime. Daniel Joseph Martinez brings to bear imperative questions about the palatability of politics through formalism.
Daniel Joseph Martinez has articulated his interest in painting, mutation, indigestibility, incongruity, modernist tropes and contradictory politics. He has defined his approach to the exhibition as one of social relevance and responsibility. The artist creates a site-specific text-based work to be painted on the façade of the building with an accompanying neighboring billboard. Martinezs signage stems from both appropriated and composed texts that function in a slippery space between propaganda, advertising and protest.
© 2006, Daniel Joseph MARTINEZ / Courtesy LAXART
Pictures from D.J. Martinez’s Video: Hollow Men, 2006.
In dialogue with the skin of the space, Daniel Joseph Martinezs work will inhabit both the main and project galleries of LAXART. A new video projection entitled Hollow Men represents a meditation on the artists mantra that mutation is the most radical ideology. The video features a repetitious gesture of the artists hands flipping the pages of a monochromatic picture book imaging a police raid. Deficient of any index of geo-political specificity, time and place is abstract and the event represented becomes generic. Performed time and again, the artists hands alter into monstrous prosthesis.
In addition, Daniel J. Martinez produces two new photographic works in the context of the LAXART installation, using iconic photographs from both the 1972 Munich Olympics and 1968 Mexico City Olympics as watershed events. Focusing on the modernist architecture of the iconic Black September image, Daniel Joseph Martinez abstracts space, subjectivity, politics and history. The project rehearses Martinezs tendency to appropriate modernist tropes in order to contaminate them, creating a rupture of both meaning and context.
LAXART’s inaugural exhibition is made possible with generous support from Linda Pace, Peter Norton Family Foundation, American Center Foundation, Danielson Foundation, E-flux, Art Papers, X-tra and InterReview.
LAXART
2640 S. La Cienega
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Gallery Hours
Tuesday - Saturday
11am – 6pm
March 18 - April 29, 2006
