Adam Martin is an Iowa-born conceptual artist whose practice explores the intersections of narrative, photography, and technology. He is best known for his interactive audiovisual installations in which players click their way through various options within a central narrative. Martin is based in Iowa and New York City.
Read MoreMartin's works address a broad range of social concerns, including identity, trauma, exploitation, sexuality, and heteronormativity.
In his broad portraits of place and time, Martin facilitates multiple personal readings with a certain darkness or uneasy curiosity. His visual novels have no plot; ambient, emotion-led storytelling is the goal. The artist's signature visual novel Competitive Endurance Manipulation (2019) references 'competitive endurance tickling'—an activity in which young, athletic men are restrained and tickled by one another. The novel chronicles Martin's encounter with Jane O'Brien Media, an underground production company led by a figure who involved young men in films involving erotic or endurance-based tickling.
Following on from Competitive Endurance Manipulation (CEM), later works such as Break U (2021) allow viewers to situate themselves within the real-life narrative of the Martin's four-year entrapment with Jane O'Brien Media. In the 18-second video, Martin is featured as 'lead tickler' with a supporting cast of anonymous young men in bright athletic wear. The words, 'break you down to build you back up' appear in red before the video slowly deteriorates into abstraction. The looping video animation resembles a broken recollection that repeats infinitely, referencing the way that traumatic experiences behave in one's subconscious.
In How to Start a High School Underground (2019), Martin's exhibition with Marc Kokopeli at Etablissement d'en face in Brussels, the visual novel CEM (2019) presented alongside photographs documenting the artist's time working in the Los Angeles tickling industry. The presentation also included an oversized cheque from Martin's former employer, Fatbastid LLC.
Adam Martin has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Post-Hardcore, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne (2022); Is Anyone Up?, Red Tracy, Copenhagen (2020); and Competitive Endurance Manipulation, Gandt, New York (2019).
Group exhibitions include More Love, Asbestos, Melbourne (2022); Banal Objects/DIY Aesthetics: A Continuation of Decentralized Reality with Expanding Intimacy, OCAT Institute, Beijing (2021); Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), Plymouth Rock, Zurich (2020); and How to Start a High School Underground, Etablissement d'en face, Brussels (2019).
Fay Janet Jackson | Ocula | 2022
