Ro2 Art 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 Art’s Cedars gallery.
Kai Peter Martin reflects on our relationship with the outside world while we are away in our interior spaces. These perceptions can manifest in various scenarios, whether through memory, fantasy, establishing a place of belonging, or by forging our own connections with the natural world by attempting to bring it inside. Martin builds off his canvas in an overlapping and three-dimensional approach, repeating motifs depicting hills, maps, trees, and knotted forms rising up in unexpected places. Each room is viewed in one point perspective, with the rear wall established as a surface for the outside world to encroach upon the interior. Interested in depicting specific imagery rather than portraying a space with accuracy, the artist explores ideas of place and containment through illusory and often dreamlike interpretations.
Artist Statement
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.
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Price
- FREE!
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