M+B is pleased to present Signals, Cameron Martin’s first exhibition with the gallery. Comprised of new non-objective paintings as well as drawings from the artist’s ongoing Reticulations series, the exhibition will run from May 18 through June 15, 2019, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18 from 6 to 8 pm.
First exhibited in his 2017 solo exhibition at the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany, Martin’s recent paintings start with a few fundamental rules — no source material, always color, and each painting must have its own internal logic. Complicating the handmade and the mechanical, the results resonate and pulse with uncanny forms that are at once acutely familiar and unnamable. Engaging current processes of image generation, perception and consumption, the paintings extend the artist’s longstanding interest in the conventions of representation, astutely negotiating illusionism, abstraction, design and depiction.
More serial in nature than the paintings, Martin’s Reticulation drawings present an insistent focus on perception, exactitude and the possibility of inscrutability. Composed of overlapping vertical lines, drawn one color at a time starting at the left of the sheet and moving from top to bottom, they evade central focus or an obvious endpoint. Because the colors mix optically, there is an explicit difference between what is seen and what is on the page. Evoking sonic reverberations, static, or contemporary information space, the works vibrate and stutter, with moments that are reminiscent of technological glitches. With their mesmerizing gradient-like fields of color, these drawings seemingly just-obscure the logic within.
Cameron Martin (b. 1970 Seattle, WA) received his BA from Brown University and continued his studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Martin has had numerous solo exhibitions including Abstracts at the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany; New Congress at James Fuentes, New York, NY; Bracket at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, NY; Focus 3: Cameron Martin at the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; and Currents 97: Cameron Martin at the St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO. His work has also been in numerous group exhibitions including When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction From the University at Albany Art Collections, University Art Museum, SUNY, Albany, NY; Mythos Berg, RLB Kunstbrücke, Innsbruck, Austria; Reclaimed: Nature and Place Through Contemporary Eyes, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Highpoint Editions—Decade One, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Surveyor, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; roundabout, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, which travelled to the Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; in Monet’s Garden, Columbus Museum or Art, OH, which travelled to the Musée Marmottan, Paris; and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Martin has received awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and the Artists at Giverny Fellowship and Residency in Giverny, France. His work is in several museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and Saint Louis Art Museum, MO. Cameron Martin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.