Daniel Joseph Martinez
How I Fell In Love With My Dirty Bomb (Opium des Volks)
Flesh Eating Prosthetics (Phagocitage des prostheses)
March 18-April 29, 2006
Opening: March 18, 2006 7-9pm
LAXART
2640 S. La Cienega
Los Angeles, CA 90034
T.323.868.5893
Tuesday through Saturday 10 -6
The inaugural exhibition to mark the opening of LAXART a new nonprofit contemporary arts organization – will feature new work by Los Angeles based artist Daniel Joseph Martinez.
Opening on March 18, 2006, LAXART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles in a space designed by LA based architect Peter Zellner. Martinez will launch the new space with a series of site-specific interventions including a text painted on the façade of the building, video, photography and sculpture.
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. Martinez brings to bear imperative questions about the palatability of politics through formalism.
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 will create 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.
In dialogue with the skin of the space, 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, Martinez will produce 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, 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.
About LAXART:
Responding to Los Angeles cultural climate, LAXART questions given contexts for the exhibition of contemporary art, architecture and design. With a renewed vision for the potential of independent art spaces, LAXART provides a center for interdisciplinary discussion and interaction and for the production and exhibition of new exploratory work. LAXART offers a space for provocation, dialogue and confrontation by practices on the ground in LA and abroad. LAXART is a hub for artists based on flexibility, transition, spontaneity and change. The space responds to an urgency and obligation to provide an accessible exhibition space for contemporary artists, architects and designers.
LAXARTs inaugural exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Linda Pace, Peter Norton Family Foundation, American Center Foundation, Danielson Foundation, E-flux, Art Papers, X-tra, and Interreview. With in-kind sponsorship from Campari.
LAXART inaugural edition by Edgar Arceneaux available now at editions@laxart.org.
LAXART series of billboards produced by Daniel Joseph Martinez, Ruben Ochoa and Mark Bradford in conjunction with the exhibition An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life at the Gallery at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theatre). Ruben Ochoa billboard on Santa Monica Blvd and Highland through 3/17 and Daniel Joseph Martinez billboard on 7th and Wall Street through 3/17.
LAXART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles, CA 90034 T.323.868.5893 www.laxart.org
LAXART will be open Tuesday through Saturday 10 -6
