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This is a selection of visual art work. Please click individual images to see full. 

For additional images contact martabelw@gmail.com

One Night in Shell  / 2017 - Present

This work is connecting the disintegration of certain social structures (education, housing, the overall economy) with ocean acidification and global warming. Living in coastal California, there is a constant reminder of the both the increased difficulty to live (if you are not in tech or finance) and the ways in which global capitalism is destroying the environment. They are taken in the context of a relationship, connecting love and desire to affective despair brought on by the Anthropocene. By focusing on ocean life we often see as the bottom (shells, crabs, barnacles) it is creating a kind of emotional solidarity in hopes of creating new political actions. 

Crab Cozy / Summer 2017

The van is reimagined as a home for an animal we do not yet know. A creature who has evolved in the Anthropocene to inhabit what remains of a civilization past. The shell becomes a space to contemplate the forms that remain when the content is no longer relevant. Mystical and campy, iridescent and trashy, Cozy Crab invites you to salvage what remains.

Seashell Aesthetics / Spring 2017

 Full text available at yesfemmes.com

#ReclaimMayDay / 2013

#ReclaimMayDay is an investigation into the changing aesthetic, performative, and theoretical frameworks of coalitional politics that have emerged in light of Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and other significant transnational movements of the past three years. The thesis has three major components: a multimedia gallery installation, a May Day themed issue of RECAPSmagazine.com (Reclaim culture, art, politics and sexuality), and a manifesto text titled “Daisy-Chain Theory.” The gallery featured a May Pole, which served as a dynamic shrine and an ephemeral memorial to the pagan and political origins of the holiday. The gallery was the site of a teach-in about the state of campus activism. RECAPS is an on-going investigation into the relationship between virtual and embodied practices, archival and new material, art production and political discourse. 

Photography

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