Art & Design Gallery to host solo show with international media artist

LAWRENCE — An internationally renowned artist with a substantial and cutting-edge body of creative work will have a solo show at the Art & Design Gallery. Through video, sculpture, print and multichannel installations, Darrin Martin’s show, “Iterations,” explores the instability of the lens-based image as a reliable record of perception and memory.

Martin’s show will be on display Monday,  Oct. 19, through Nov. 13 during regular gallery hours. An opening reception and gallery talk will be 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20. The show and opening is free, and the public is welcome.

“Darrin’s conversations around technology, the body, accessibility and mediation are at the forefront of the contemporary conversations in the field,” said Benjamin Rosenthal, assistant professor of visual art.

Exposure to artists far outside KU’s geographic area and research conversations provides an important intellectual diversity that is valuable for the Department of Visual Art’s cultural mission. Unlike other fields where the dominant mode of research dissemination is textual, visual art’s is most often exhibition.

“By bringing the actual work here, students can experience the work firsthand as it is intended,” Rosenthal said. “The exhibition can serve as a critical space where questioning, challenging and interpreting work can exist outside the confines of the classroom.”

“Iterations” is a culmination of recent works constructing a dialogue among various media practices across a range of time from 19th century stereoscopic photographic imagery to today’s 3-D scanning technologies. Martin’s works engage the synesthetic qualities of perception as a way to examine the limits of certainty. Influenced by his own experiences with hearing loss, his current projects consider notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies and audio descriptions. 

Martin is an artist and educator whose videos have screened internationally at festivals and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pacific Film Archives, California; Impakt Festival, the Netherlands, and European Media Art Festival, Germany. In 2009 he toured a program of works to more than a dozen cities in the United States. His installations have been shown at venues including The Kitchen, New York; University of Toronto, Canada; Grand Central Art Center, California, and, most recently, in solo exhibitions at Aggregate Space Gallery, California, and Art Space on Main, California.

Martin frequently collaborates with artist Torsten Zenas Burns, building diverse speculative fictions around re-imagined educational practices. Their works have been included in screenings and exhibitions in venues, including Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Paris/Berlin International, in France and Germany; Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival, Germany; and Eyebeam and the Dumbo Arts Center, New York. They recently mounted an exhibition titled “ARK3: The Workshop Scenarios” at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, New York, which traveled to Krowswork Gallery, California.

Martin received his bachelor's degree in fine arts with an emphasis on video and sculpture from Alfred University’s School of Art and Design, and he received his master's degree in fine arts from the University of California, San Diego. He has held artist residencies at Cite Internationale des Arts, Eyebeam, Experimental Television Center and Signal Culture. Martin also occasionally curates video screenings, most recently, an exhibition of works by 18 artists for Vanity Projects, New York, and Parsons Hall Project Space, Massachusetts, titled “Tooth and Nail.” He is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at University of California, Davis.

Chalmers Hall is at the northeast corner of 15th Street and Naismith Drive. Visitor parking is available at the Allen Fieldhouse Parking Garage, 1501 Irving Hill Road.

The Department of Visual Art is one of four departments in the School of the Arts. As part of the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts offers fresh possibilities for collaboration between the arts and the humanities, sciences, social sciences, international and interdisciplinary studies.