Canadian Art International: Edgar Martins
Photofusion, London
To create the works in this exhibition, Edgar Martins spent two years photographing landscapes and suburban life within a one-mile radius of his studio in Bedford, England. After years of travelling, analyzing urban and suburban landscapes around the world, he felt challenged by the proximity and familiarity of his locations. In this series of new work, guided by rigorous, self-imposed rules for establishing critical distance and looking at familiar places anew, he sought to document the city from a position of isolation.
Martins worked in dense, foggy conditions, and this is reflected in the moody, atmospheric and enigmatic landscapes. He was born in Portugal and lived for many years in Macau, China, before moving to the UK; this history does much to explain his interest in the contemporary city and in rendering images of the familiar and the strange. In one of the most intriguing images, an abandoned car burns in a suburban landscape. With only an unpaved road and a distant house as context, it is an image that could have been taken anywhere. In this case, Martins watched the aftermath of a suburban joyride as teenagers drove up, set the damaged car alight and ran off into the distance. However, an accompanying wall text describes not this but a different narrative about cars and suburban car culture.
Martins's concerns—the alienation of people from their surroundings and the tension between urban and suburban—are well-trod, but the strength of this exhibition lies in the curious and compelling juxtaposition between texts and images. Each group of photographs is accompanied by a commissioned text. All the writings are drawn from The Diminishing Present, a book published by The Moth House, a British arts organization and publisher. Viewers approach the artworks thinking the texts will explain the ambiguous and enigmatic photographs, but they discover otherwise. Martins's interest is, instead, in disorientation. The texts describe other experiences and observations on suburbia, the park, the forest, cars and the road. Viewers are resolutely left to recognize the common terrain and draw their own conclusions.
Fall 2005
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