In the winter of 2001, artists Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz moved from their loft in Brooklyn into an old house in the Delaware Highlands of Pennsylvania. Isolated by harsh winters and an entirely different cultural landscape, Martin and Muñoz channeled the strangeness of this shifting reality into a body of work that began around a series of snow globes.
Martin and Muñoz’s is a collaborative process, one informing the other, each adding something new to the overall composition, together determining how to achieve a common end. This same duality continues in the tragicyet-comedic themes of their narratives and the intimacy of the snow globes juxtaposed with the sprawling pastoral nature of their large-scale photographs. We are immersed, but also observers, witnesses at a somewhat safer distance.
Martin and Muñoz’s modern travelers are wary, plagued with uncertainty and anxiety, subjected to strip searches, and accompanied by the pervasive worstcase-scenario mindset. Their stories allude to the paranoia of a potential police state and hidden surveillance. The contemporary dioramas encapsulate social constructs gone amok, freak weather. Luckily, we find reassurance in their containment and the artists’ prevailing sense of humor.
At first the scenes resemble postcards and keepsakes from a too-bright gleaming paradise. They are armored with heavy plex or just beyond reach in the refractions of glass domes, and we covet them. We want to take them home, like gift shop memorabilia from the vacation spot we couldn’t afford in the first place. They evoke memories of the dollhouses and train sets of our childhood, and the epic masterpieces above illusory living room fireplaces we never owned. Yet in an unexpected turnabout, a tarantella, a theater in the round, the world of dreams we thought we knew turns upside down.
Perhaps it is this tenuousness throughout that elevates the creations of Martin and Muñoz beyond object or kitsch, novelty or cleverness. The work spirals from light to dark, two-sided, conveying the existential dilemma of being human. In a turn, we are both hopeful and completely terrified, shocked and amused by the sinister, enthusiastic to make the trip and full of trepidation.
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