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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

Refocusing Ecology 2021-Present

Like many, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I became increasingly aware of and enchanted by the subtleties of the local environment- birds, flowers, and plants that I had previously rushed by in keeping up with the pace of “normal life.” As an art historian, I became especially interested in the role that photography has played in the land conservation movement, creation of national parks, and stewardship of the commons. During California’s Gold Rush Era, photography was used to promote the federal protection of land. However, at the same time, the new medium was used as a tool for extractive, land-destroying industries like mining and logging. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the photography of Carleton Watkins was used in Congress to argue for the formation of National Park Systems. Mining companies also employed him for industrial speculation. The histories of conservation and large scale resource extraction are intertwined. Both conservation and extraction required violent removal of Indigenous inhabitants and the destruction of large swaths of these stewarded ecosystems for the conservation of a few spectacular sites. This history begs the question: how can we reframe conservation? The collages are based on local ecosystems and environmental histories made of found and original photographs. By altering the photographs through collage, I ask us to look differently at the landscape we inhabit. The images challenge the celebration of the monumental aspects of nature and instead highlight the relationship between the built and natural environments. The style of the work not only riffs on the history of landscape photography, but also that of psychedelia, both of which have deep roots in the Northern California landscape. In my work, I ask what is the relationship between the landscape and the aesthetic innovations it co-produces with its inhabitants? This project included free workshops led by artists and naturalists.

Funded by the City Arts Recovery Design, Santa Cruz

One Night in Shell  / 2017 - 2019

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. 

Misc. Photography

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