Tony Martin

February 14–March 10, 2003

Visual Poetry in Light in Time

Sideshow Gallery is pleased to present the work of painter and new media artist Tony Martin.

The exhibition begins Friday, February 14 and continues through Monday, March 10. The opening reception for this exhibition will be held on Saturday, February 15, from 6 to 9 p.m.

The exhibition will include "Over Under Across" and "Five Stanzas:" wall-sized projection pieces shown alternately by continuous look. "Over Under Across" makes use of drawing and transparent cinematographic techniques. This visual poem makes a confrontation of: looking up (over us, "more" than we are), under (down, "less" than we are) and across ("what we are, on the horizontal). "Five Stanzas," an amalgam of liquid projection, hand-painted slides, and animation demonstrates the artist's decades long mode of visual scoring and improvisation.

Martin is one of the major originators of the movement of art using new technology that has taken over the cultural world of the new millennium. The legendary visual compositions produced at the San Francisco Tape Center and Bill Graham's Fillmore West, stand as early testament to his love of "painting in time." Both his painting and light work reveal Martin's characteristic synthesis of emotionality and thoughtfulness: open, receptive space coherent with high tension.

As early as 1968, Howard Wise called Martin's work "cybernetic" for the processes he used for incorporating viewers into his art work. This January, Martin received a commission from Electronic Arts Intermix to create "Galaxy," a viewer participatory work for the Web. Martin's interactive sculptures and installations have been shown at such places as P.S.1, for the composers Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and David Tudor, and choreographers Anna Halprin and Merce Cunningham.