Artist Bio

Martin is an architect and artist living in Los Angeles. He received degrees in architecture from Penn State University and Pratt Institute and was awarded a fellowship to Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, Russia in 2017. His artistic work spans across multiple forms of media yet does not fall neatly into any one. The work ranges from poetry, collage, science fiction, architectural fiction, and photography. His work has appeared in group exhibitions in New York, London, Utrecht, Budapest, and Moscow and has been published by a handful of independent publishers.

Artist Statement

Martin’s artistic practice explores the scenes found at the intersection of modern infrastructure and novel forms of wilderness. He imagines the role these spaces could play a role in providing or supporting liberatory practices through illegibility, deviance, and malfunction in the pursuit of alternative futures. He speculates on how the cross pollination proliferation of these spaces may affect our practices, policies, and psychologies through a variety of lenses including and beyond architectural design.

With his photography, a desire to name and articulate new spaces slowly transformed into a compulsion to document the ones he finds already in play. Because alternative spaces are often illusory and temporary, he feels compelled to preserve something of them in memory, if not in time. These spaces and moments generally do not merit out attention; they are parts of the world we see out of the corner of our eyes, the emptiness that hazes at the edges of our attention. Architectural and urban theorists have invented an array of terms for these spaces: edgelands, junkspaces, subnatures, cryptoforests, dross-scapes, heterotopias, on and on. An empty storefront, brutalist freeway junctions, a puddle filling with concrete dust, battered service entrances, a stretch of the banal asphalt street, a patch of weeds. These are the spaces we make without intention, both ephemeral and eternal, and are deeply woven into our lives.

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