highlike

SHANTELL MARTIN

シャンテル·マーティン

source: shantellmartin

The work of Shantell Martin is a meditation of black and white lines; a language of characters, creatures and messages that invite her viewers to share a role in her creative process.

Her work has appeared at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto and she has created live digital drawings at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image and Moma. Her first solo gallery exhibition in the Fall of 2012 sold out — with her work featured on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Her commissions at Asia’s ultra-high end department store Lane Crawford, Y&R’s global headquarters and a custom installation for Miami Art Week’s Pulse in 2012 met with the same fanfare as her hand-illustrated bedroom walls graced the cover of the New York Times home section in May 2012.

Her work has appeared in Creative Review Magazine, and she is still honored to have been named French Glamour’s New York’s “coolest it girl” in 2011. Martin has collaborated with prominent commercial brands, as well as with bespoke luxury partners like 3×1 denim, Citizen, and Aruliden. Martin is an adjunct professor at NYU and she recently moved her studio to Tribeca in the Spring of 2013.

To read on and for more information click the About tab.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: brooklynbased

Lines are tricky geometries. We write on lines and stand in them; we use them to measure and divide. They can bridge two disparate points, or just as easily, they can segregate and exclude.

Yet the lines of visual artist Shantell Martin slyly dodge such politics, running footloose and fancy free into a fantasy world of surrealist play.

In Williamsburg’s Black and White Gallery, the artist’s lines parade across the walls and into the back courtyard, arching into towering cities that overflow with fanciful characters. For Martin, no surface is out of bounds. She draws on spray-painted animal skulls, recycled milk bottles and even post-its. Indeed, her ambitious vision seems to thrive when the constrictions of frames and corners fail to be a threat.

“Continuous Line” is her first solo show in the city, and is an ode to the black Staedtler Lumocolor pen with which the now Brooklyn-based artist began. (Martin was raised and schooled in London.) Over the past few years, Martin has garnered international acclaim for her live light projections at both MoMA and the megaclubs of Tokyo. Using a digital drawing tablet,
the artist’s neon-colored gestures are projected onto a theatre-size screen, usually to be danced to or sung in front of by children and adults alike. She’s even had her bedroom—the walls of which are covered with her own meandering art work—featured in the New York Times. But with a strict palatte of black and white, the current Brooklyn show maintains a feeling of intimacy, as if we have stepped into a life-size version of the doodles that run through her sketchbook.

Some have described Martin’s drawing technique as “free association,” due both to its ephemeral lifespan and the way her subject matter seems to bounce from one chimerical association to another. In one section of “Continuous Line” for instance, an electric drill emerges from a mountainside cliff, the outline of the drill bit transforming into the infamous phrase “Drill Drill
Drill.” Follow the line downward and it turns into the profile of a giant’s sleeping head, travel upwards and it becomes the silk of a spider web.

Yet the value of her work is not all on the surface, and carries within it a reflexive depth. She merges text into her work the way a deejay might sample lines from another’s song, using short, deceptively simple phrases in twisted repetition. Tiny poems are tucked into crevices that engage the viewer in a kind of Steinian word play, making requests like: “Sit by the see with me watch the see move out and far.”

What fills the blankness left behind when a black line slices through space? Inquisitive imagination, Martin seems to be saying, and of course, many, many other lines.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: iflyertv

シャンテル・マーティンはシンプルな一本線の持つ特性を活かし繊細かつ複雑な異次元の世界を描き出す。変化し続ける独特のシャンテルワールドに登場する生き物たちは次へ次へと常に進化してゆく。 従来の“描く”という行為を飛び越え、即興イラスト、光、オーディエンスとの対話という三要素を組み合わせ、新たなジャンルを切り開いている。現在ニューヨーク在住。