Setting up this transaction of stylistic exchange, Martin’s paintings recode the familiar as bizarre, grotesque, and humorously aberrant. Creating suggestive narratives from their visual and psychological tension, souvenirs are rendered with haunted house ghoulishness, bucolic tableaux loom with gothic fairytale threat, and nonsensical still-lifes refract the absurdity of their composition. Disquietingly elevating the ephemera of pop into the realm of painterly enchantment, Martin blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, creating new possibilities for interpretation and value.

Using many of the pictorial devices found in his paintings, Martin’s sculptures create spatial and referential distortion through their eclectic materiality. Infused by a sense of drama and play, Martin’s life-sized architectures envision a ground between reality, illusion, and fantasy, theatrically placing the viewer as both viewer and participant in their topsy-turvy realm. For Brennholz + Ravioli, Martin has created a new work comprised of cuckoo clocks, thematically linking to his paintings.