Outside the shining, new, enormous Shell ethane cracker plastic factory of Beaver County, PA; among strip mined land in Egypt Valley; in Cleveland as an exhaust fire comes into view during the recent solar eclipse; inside an Indiana family farmhouse that lies burnt-out amid a field of new wind turbines along I-65 to Chicago; along a street where a praying mantis consumes a still-loud cicada.
Fifteen photographs and a two-channel video comprise “Arena” , Colin Martinez’s first solo exhibition to date. Produced between late 2023-2024, the exhibition considers the coalescence of a familiar collective regional landscape, familial history, ecological change, and new capital investment in a changing Midwestern United States.
To find respite and wonder in a changing world is not an easy task. Anthropologists and geographers like Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing & William Cronon have, in part, argued for a pragmatic interpretation of our contemporary landscape, rejecting nihilism and instead offering a surrealist, precarious hope for our conception of the future. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing remarks that the within the ruin of our blasted landscapes, we can still find solace in its overgrown edges, even catching the scent of our ‘latent commons’.
The portraits within Arena find their subjects immersed in landscapes familiar to a Midwestern collective memory; Daniel in the woods behind his families home; Brennan, a bodybuilder, in a forgotten Dublin office park; Alyssa within a field of grass off of a county road; Lamar in an empty bedroom. By picturing the landscapes of our region Arena asks what world of curiosity and hope might we find in these degraded landscapes?
The images and videos of Arena present a digital photographic documentation that build upon the possibility of documentary photography to string together disparate lives and landscapes, creating ‘life-worlds’ and vignettes within larger landscapes. The selections made for the presentation of the work’s scale offer magnification, life-like perspective, and connection across vignettes; its components- polystyrene foam & pine wood strips- provide an acknowledgement of two common materials of the region.
Moving In is a two channel looping video scored by Paul Martinez. The video opens with an aerial video of wildfire smoke from Canadian wildfires that had drifted into southern Ohio in 2023 and a shot of Alum Creek upstream. The creek appears throughout the course of the two stacked videos, as a figure is seen moving increasingly closer to it, ultimately fully submerging themselves. Upland from the creek the interiors picture the former Brown family property in Columbus. The City recently purchased the property from the family after the death of Mrs. Brown left the property vacant. In the coming months the property will be cleared.