greg martin.

Breathe

At the start of 2020, seeking to quiet my mind, reduce stress, and simplify my life, I began making a strong shift towards self-reflection, helped by a newfound focus on meditation.

When the covid-19 pandemic began to rapidly change the ways in which we all live, the additional isolation, and immediate slowing down of everything, was something I curiously found myself looking forward to. This forced pause creating an additional opportunity for inward reflection.

In this slowness I found myself strongly drawn to nature. Extended walks along secluded trails in a local park became meditations. I found beauty, safety, and solace in this solitude.

During these excursions, taken without specific purpose or plan, I began taking photographs, creating temporary sculptures, acting out simple performances and collecting an odd assortment of items.

Personal actions within this time of global inaction.

Nature is unpredictable, wild, always seeking growth and expansion. All around us are untold examples of this, both seen and unseen. I am fascinated by the duality inherent in nature. Life/death, creation/destruction, finite/infinite. Much as the covid virus has been rapidly growing, expanding and spreading, all things in nature are drawn to do the same. To propagate, to make more of themselves, to overtake and be seen. To claim as their own.

Awareness of Breath refers to both the central tenant of meditation, focus on the breath, as well as how this pandemic has made us all acutely aware of our breathing, a focus on the breath in an entirely different context.

Social-distancing and mandatory face masks showing us the dangers of the breath in these times. The duality of the breath as the bringer of life/potential carrier of death.

These images of some of the items I have collected highlight this duality and the desire of nature to take over. Its familiarity and its strangeness, its expansiveness and claustrophobia, its unrelenting desire for growth and the destruction inherent in this new growth.

Greg Martin

May 2020

This body of work uses pre-film photography and mixed-media to explore the illusory intimacy of social media.

     Through ongoing analog explorations my work speaks to our individually curated and constructed realities in the digital world.

Referencing the history of portraiture-as-social-mirror, I am fascinated with the connection between early photographic portraits and modern selfies. 

With the advent of tintypes in the 1860's we entered into an world that, for the first time, images of the "self" were widely distributed for mass consumption. 

Collected, carried and viewed at any time, tintypes became a method to have a physical connection to loved ones near and far, and to imagine the lives of famous people, by looking into their faces.

For this work I intensively explore and experiment with one of the oldest of photographic processes, wetplate collodion. Using chemistry hand-mixed from traditional formulas and self-built cameras and equipment, I focus on the portrait. The resulting works are all photographed directly onto sheets of glass (ambrotypes), metal (tintypes), and plastic (plexi-types). These constructed pieces, and their use of layering, space, movement and distance also play with the notion of what is a "photograph". 

I m the gallery setting, viewers were invited to study the works from up-close and from a distance, along with through the camera of their mobile phone. As the primary tool of social media, the cellphone provides yet another way to engage with my work. As social media has the effect of distorting and compressing our lives, viewing my work through the cellphone camera compresses and distorts what we see, giving the viewer the false illusion of seeing more clearly.

This ongoing body of work explores how we overlay the geometry of our experiences onto all we see. We see things through a lens that is clouded by history and personal experience and these geometries become a part of our visual landscape.

As a part of the Cleveland Foundation's Creative Fusion Program, I was invited by the Cleveland Print Room and the Cleveland Museum of Art to be a part of Creative Fusion-Spring 2017_Cuba Edition. Representatives from seven local arts organizations traveled to Cuba in January of 2017 to start to build innovative partnerships between Cuba and Cleveland, centered on transformative art and artists in both communities. As a part of this trip I spent several days shooting wet plate collodion photographs on the streets of Old Havana and Matanzas.

Series of portraits exploring extremes of dark and light along with surface fogging. Many of these were shot with non-traditional lenses such as mounting inexpensive magnifying glasses onto camera lens board.

2009-present

Wet plate collodion portraiture

I have been drawn to the beauty and strangeness of industry since my childhood in the early 1970's, when my dad would take my brother and I on hikes in the Cleveland Flats. I find it endlessly fascinating to explore these areas that speak to Cleveland's heyday as an industrial giant.