Artist Bio

Martin is an architect and artist currently based 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 to collage, science fiction, architectural fiction, and finally to 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 scenarios at the intersection of modern infrastructure, emerging technology, and novel forms of wilderness. He uses these spaces to study how illegibility, deviance, and malfunction may provide space for alternative futures. He speculates on how these confluences may affect our practices, policies, and psychologies through a variety of lenses including and beyond architectural design.

What began as a compulsion to articulate slowly transformed into a compulsion to document. To preserve something in memory, if not in time, of those spaces and moments that generally do not merit out attention, those 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, a graffiti encrusted fire hydrant, a mud puddle filling with concrete dust, a marred and empty service entrance, a stretch of the banal asphalt street, a patch of weeds. These are the spaces we make without intention, myriad and eternal, they are a deep part of our lives.

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