Simon Martin
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Simon Martin (born Cheshire, England 1965) is an artist living and working in London.
Martin attended the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, between 1985-89. After spending time as an art lecturer, Martin began to establish himself as an artist in his own right, with his first solo show in 1994. Since then he has shown at White Columns, New York, The Powerplant, Toronto and was selected to appear in the Tate Triennial 2006, at Tate Britain.
Martin's recent works have been film based, looking closely at how the viewer sees an art object and also how a museum or gallery is navigated by its visitors. Carlton (2006) is a short film about a the Carlton Cabinet bookcase, set in an empty gallery space. The bookcase was created in the 1980s by Memphis - the design group led by the legendary Ettore Sottsass, which made a short-lived yet dynamic postmodernist assault on Modernist good sense and aesthetic conservatism. Consisting of details and tracking shots, the film carries a female voiceover whose tone and style of delivery is reminiscent of shampoo adverts and marketing infomercials. The narration describes a brief history of Memphis and goes onto self-consciously speculate on a Postmodernist trajectory in an attempt to answer some of the questions it provokes with even more questions - the deadpan filming animated by the compressed and urgent narrative.
He is represented by Carl Freedman Gallery, London.
