In Martine's Words...
I am an artist who works across film and video, programming and development, photography, sculpture, performance, and writing. Something that most people don't realize, and isn't evident necessarily from looking at the work, is that none of what I make is outsourced.
Unlike many studios, every single part of the work is done within the studio. I'm constantly building new technologies and programs, and making pieces by hand. While it may not look like something has been made by hand, it has. The processes are robust, thorough, and experimental, and handled by me at every step of the way.
Science fiction addresses how the individual is going to cope with the alienating, disruptive societies and conditions we will inevitably encounter.
Being black in America is a special, horrific science fiction of its own kind; rarely do I see it treated this way in mainstream culture, or even in the context of art.
Building on my decade-long interdisciplinary practice, my recent work uses collage across multiple formats that feature iterative shots narrated from multiple vantages, often alongside AI-controlled text encounters. Researching how blackness circulates—both in local and global contexts—I recombine images and text to create new meaning from the memories, myths, and histories that circulate within culture and society. I consider the past in the present tense, to tell a different story about the social, institutional, and historical contexts in which blackness is framed.
Ugly Plymouths (2020) is an immersive video installation comprised of a one-act play shown across three screens – starring Hot Dog, Doobie, and Le Que Sabe. As the narrative progresses, the three characters talk and sing alongside and over each other, one receding as another moves into the foreground. On occasion their dialogue falls into a robotic unison, a kind of emotionless chorus – the voices define the distance between them more than the relation. They have trouble relating, despite their efforts at romance, and this troubled connection is the subject of their dialogue.
DED stars my digital likeness traversing a video game underworld in which I kill myself repeatedly in various creative ways, surrounded by non-player characters and set to an operatic score composed and sung by me.
For the video series Kita’s World, I created a digital avatar modeled on Cita of Cita's World, the late-1990s BET music video show. Kita is recast in contemporary scenarios, considering the problem of the psychosomatic slip in the digital era, or the psychoanalytic eeriness of a nightmare, or leading the viewer in a meditation.
Through these strategies I want to foment thinking and conversation around communities most deeply affected by the functioning of ideologies of technology and race. Historically, my work has used broadly accessible media, such as television and Vines, to consider how blackness circulates.
I now find myself in the position to reach those broad audiences directly, through feature length film projects. I recently completed a film, premiering at New Directors/New Films in April that follows a disillusioned MFA student about to graduate into the world. It addresses the pitfalls of self-actualization and the fallacies of the art world. The narrative centers around the graduation party, and what does and doesn't happen there.
I want to make things that change people's lives. Big, unforgettable, life changing works. I want to reach broader audiences, continuing to invest in what's possible in the context of exhibitions and films both.
I will also continue to work right at the edge of emerging technologies.
