Daniel Joseph Martinez "A story for tomorrow in 4 chapters"
Simon Preston Gallery
This event has ended.
Simon Preston Gallery presents the second of two consecutive exhibitions by Daniel Joseph Martinez, comprised of four large-scale recent photographic works and a sculptural sound installation. The preceding exhibition of body builder and beauty pageant images from 1978/79 served to underscore the artist's longstanding and anarchic investigations, which utilize the body as political and social agent.
For this exhibition, A story for tomorrow in 4 chapters, Dostoevsky loved the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Muhammad Ali and Dandelions, Lick my hunch! (2010-12) is presented as an installation consisting of four photographs, each seven feet high by five feet wide. Shown leaning against the walls of the gallery, the images unfold as one-dimension of all four sides of a single figure in space. One photograph shows the back of a remorseful hunchback wearing a Pope’s mitre and a penitent’s rope belt. Seen from the front in another image, this figure reveals a huge deformed face, courtesy of a vintage papier-mâché mask. Tattooed on his chest and arms are blasphemous inscriptions in Hebrew, Arabic and Latin each invoking the power of their Gods. Two more photographs show the figure genuflecting on an Afghan rug made during the Afghan-Soviet war and woven with images of battle.
For over thirty years Martinez has made indelible and incisive critiques of the cultural and political orders, incorporating a flexible array of media including photography, text, sculpture, installation, performance and public art. A preoccupation with unmasking racial and sectarian stereotypes in order to deconstruct and destabilize widespread cultural assumptions runs parallel in his conceptual practice with an investigation of identitary representation in all its forms—from language and its associations with hegemony and power, to the systems of punishment and control performed upon the physical body.
Media
Schedule
from November 04, 2012 to December 23, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-11-04 from 18:00 to 20:00