Throughout his career spanning close to four decades, Daniel Joseph Martinez has engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores through artworks that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions. Operating with fluidity and as open source manifestations not bound by any singular category, his works extend from the ephemeral to the solid. Martinez's practice takes the form of text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public interventions to unapologetically question issues of personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference. Ongoing themes include contamination, history, surveillance, violence, nomadic power, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, and systems of symbolic exchange, directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty. Their commonality is that they all address topics of race, class and sociopolitical boundaries present within American society.
