Kai Peter Martin
A Wilderness Inside
july 06 - August 03, 2019
RO2 ART | the cedars
1501 south ervay street, Dallas, tx 75215
July, 2019
Ro2 Art | Dallas, TX |
Dallas, July 2019 - Ro2 is proud to present A Wilderness Inside, a solo exhibition featuring new works by artist Kai Peter Martin. The show will run from July 6 through August 3, 2019. There will be an artist reception held on Saturday, July 13 from 7-10 PM at Ro2’s Cedars gallery located at 1501 S Ervay Street, Dallas, TX 75215.
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ARTIST STATEMENT
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This new body of work combines the subject matter of landscape imagery and interiors in unconventional ways to explore ideas about containment, place, home, how we relate to the world outside and how images work on us. Trees rise up in the middle of an empty room, images of buildings appear to be drawn directly on the walls, partial figures emerge from unexpected places.
Each artwork acts as both a shallow one-point perspective room and a framed image, with the rear wall of the room acting as a surface to play out questions about what our relationship to the outside world becomes when we are removed from it, confined to an interior. It could be memory, fantasy, attempts to orient oneself and find a place to belong, or methods of bringing the natural world inside. Repeated motifs—hill shapes, obscured or abraded map images, tangled forms—echo between different works, suggesting a preoccupation with the imagery itself rather than the faithful depiction of a specific space. This work continues Martin’s use of paper pulp plaster applied to canvas with a variety of techniques. The materiality of the paper pulp plaster allows for a wide variety of moves—sculptural relief, painting, drawing, etching, and cutting—to find compelling ways of building up a surface and image. Some objects edge towards illusion, others are drawn on the surface and fail to fully form, and certain parts rise from the surface three-dimensionally, creating a playful dissonance in the represented space. |
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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Kai Peter Martin lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. He studied at Reed College in Portland, OR and University of North Texas in Denton, TX, receiving his MFA from the latter in 2015. He lived in Los Angeles for two years, working as a studio assistant for Michael Williams, and as a member of the Little Tokyo Art Complex cooperative.
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