Cameron Martin: Clear Skies

Solo exhibition

Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Cameron Martin, on view from January 7 – February 21, 2004. Clear Skies is the artist’s second one-person exhibition at the gallery. Martin is the recipient of an Artists-in-Giverny Residency and a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and will be featured in the upcoming 2004 Whitney Biennial Exhibition.

The exhibition will feature seven paintings that depict distinctly different landscapes, including a mountain range, a stalagmite formation, a whirlpool, a forest, and a winter scene. These images are conceptually linked, addressing the complex relationship between contemporary culture and environment, and incorporates various strategies of representation in painting. As with the artist’s previous show, Standstill, a variety of materials and techniques are deployed – including oil, alkyd, interference paint, acrylic, industrial paint spray, and stencil – in the making of each painting. The title of the exhibition alludes to the Bush administration’s ‘Clear Skies Initiative,’ a proposed legislation which is ostensibly intended to curb pollution and improve air quality, but would in fact decrease regulation of industrial pollution.

The painting Conflation (all works dated 2003) is a representation of Mount Rainier in Seattle, the artist’s hometown. Martin has taken a ‘commercial’ image of nature normally used to sell everything from beer and baseball to tourism in the Northwest, choosing instead to depict an ominous dark and dusky twilight. The Crooked and Wide proposes the remaining possibility of wonder in the natural world in the image of an active whirlpool. Like a mysterious black hole in space, it seems to be an entry into something unknown, and its strength is both compelling and terrifying. Martin’s distinctively American landscapes present nature as personal and cultural touchstones, metaphorically charged and endowed with beauty.

Cameron Martin was born 1970 in Seattle, WA, and lives and works in Brooklyn. He studied at Brown University and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Recent group exhibitions include Anton Kern Gallery, NY; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NY; and Stefan Stux, NY.