Daria Martin: One of the things that makes me doubt `bb`dctb`shnm Biography Daria Martin was born in San Francisco in 1973 and has been based in London since 2002. She received her BA in humanities from Yale University in 1995 and her MFA from UCLA in 2000. Martin’s solo exhibitions include Sensorium Tests, MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, UK, 2012, and Three M Commission: Minotaur, a touring exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, New Museum in New York, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, 2009–10, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, 2007, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 2006, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2005, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2005. Martin’s trilogy of films, In the Palace (2000), Birds (2001) and Close Up Gallery (2003), was acquired by the Tate in 2007. Working between theatre, design and art, Martin’s hypnotic 16 mm films create a magical, mystical, mythical world, activating the spaces of dream and the unconscious. The artist describes her works as ‘daydream machines’. ‘Subjects such as robots, an archive of dream diaries and close-up ‘I came to the medium of film card magic, are explored within isolated spaces such as the wings of a theatre, a military academy, or a scaled up modernist sculpture,’ because of its open potential, she says. ‘These protective yet fragmented settings, full of seams and shadows, stand in for the capacities of the film medium itself, a permeable container that consumes and recycles the world at large.’ its invitation to travel through In this exhibition, created especially for and with ACCA, Martin presents time and space within an her largest ever survey of films together with her grandmothers diary notes, drawings and paintings. Significant works including Birds (2001), Wintergarden (2005-11), and Harpstrings and Lava (2007) are imagined world.’ presented in stages, all leading to the final encompassing film: One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt. DARIA MARTIN `bb`dctb`shnm Curatorial Rationale Daria Martin, whose distinctive artistic labour and Martin’s fictions. aesthetic, delivered in 16 mm Also presented are paintings film, deals with the body’s senses and diary notes by Martin’s as well as the extra-sensory grandmother, Susi Martin, which zones of memory, dream and manifest a collaboration across the unconscious. Martin employs generations. tableaux, linking her films to other JULIANA ENGBERG depictions from art history, such Images below left to right: Daria Martin Birds (2001), as the paintings of the Symbolists Soft Materials (2004), Birds, Untitled painting by and Surrealists, as well as the Susi Martin, Soft Materials. costumes and attitudes of the Bauhaus theatre. Daria’s films take the viewer into a kind of sombulant state. Hypnotic in pace and curious in their stories which use symbolism and myth as foundational elements, they present as dreams in a continuous exploration of character and experience. Martin’s works are presented as stages leading to the final encompassing film: One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt. This, like a psychoanalytic session, impinges on the minds of Martin’s actors as they grapple with their filmic personae, with the nature of `bb`dctb`shnm Exhibition Map The exhibition consists of seven 16 mm films, plus a selection of typed diary pages and paintings by Daria’s grandmother, Susi Martin. [WORK 1] Daria Martin Birds 2001 16 mm film 7 minutes 30 seconds [WORK 2] Daria Martin In the Palace 2000 16 mm film 7 minutes [WORK 3] Daria Martin Soft Materials 2004 16 mm film 10 minutes 30 seconds [WORK 4] Daria Martin Wintergarden 2005-2011 16 mm film 12 minutes [WORK 5] Daria Martin Harpstrings and Lava 2007 16 mm film 13 minutes [WORK 6] Daria Martin Minotaur 2008 16 mm film 9 minutes [WORK 7] Daria Martin One of The Things That Makes Me Doubt 2010-2011 16 mm film, 32 minutes Copyright the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. `bb`dctb`shnm Key works Birds 2001 16 mm film 7 minutes 30 seconds In her early works at art school Daria Martin created abstract paintings, however her interest in the assemblage works of artist Joseph Cornell lead her to film and an interest in surrealism. Cornell is best known for his boxed assemblages in which he arranged objects reflecting his various interests. For Martin, the medium of film could provide a similar opportunity to combine disciplines and to quote and layer references from art, dance and film history, creating a gesamtkunstwerk, or total painting set in motion. Above and left, Daria Martin, Birds (2001); Below left to right Wassily Kandinsky Composition VIII (1923); Oskar Schlemmer Bauhaus performances (circa 1923) Filmed in a white studio space, Birds (2001) references the ideals of Modernism with a soundtrack crafted with a moog synthesizer and performers dressed in retro-futuristic costumes reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet. Drawing reference from Kandinsky, Martin combines colourful geometric props with playful tableaux vivants that embrace awkwardness and absurdity. ‘I intentionally include in the edit moments in which the performer drops their guard, stops acting, allows themselves to relax, ‘I was intrigued by Oskar Schlemmer’s direction of the Bauhaus reveals exhaustion,’ Martin has said. theatre program: he combined instruction in the arts of vaudeville Tate curator Carmen Juliá has written with an application of his own rigorous painting practice; he created that ‘Martin’s films combine sculptural a continuum, not always seamless, between the dress-up games of form and painterly colour with the the Bauhaus’ gala costumed balls and his own self-serious, pseudo- performing body, and are characterised scientific study of abstraction. I’m very attracted to awkward clashes by a lack of dialogue that leaves the like Schlemmer’s: areas where Apollonian control and Dionysian body, articulated by pose, as the main means of expression.’ release come into conflict.’ DARIA MARTIN `bb`dctb`shnm `bb`dctb`shnm Daria Martin, Birds (2001) Key works In the Palace 2000 16 mm film 7 minutes As an art student Martin saw Swiss artist Alberto Giocometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M. 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She was taken by the work’s ‘particularly evocative feeling, as if the figures within it have each been caught within their own dreams, simultaneously sleepwalking through the same house’ She created a scaled up version of the sculpture for her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. The idea that sparked In the Palace’ Martin has explained, ‘was a desire to literally Above and left, Daria Martin, In The Palace (2000); Below left to right Alberto Giacommetti. In The Palace realise my own fantasy to inhabit this at 4am (1932); Joseph Cornell, Fortune Telling Parrot (1937) photograph by George Platt Lyne (1941); small sculpture, to blow it up to human Martha Graham, Lamentation (1930); dimensions and to populate it with ‘Joseph Cornell, who filled performers’. hundreds of boxes with delicate selections from his collections Martin’s performers are poised in a of objects and images, is an series of tableau vivants resembling the artist who has fascinated me for choreographies of The Ballet Russe and many years. His boxes seem to Martha Graham, as well the photographs compress emotional experience; of George Platt Lynes. sometimes, like Giacometti’s early sculptures, they take the form of a game or a maquette that seemed to invite, yet exclude, participation. These boxes seduce you into complicity, yet they also shut you out of their self-contained worlds. Like The Palace at 4am, they suggest a whole world growing from a lap- sized space.’ DARIA MARTIN `bb`dctb`shnm `bb`dctb`shnm Daria Martin, In The Palace (2000) Key works Wintergarden 2005-2011 16 mm film 12 minutes Daria Martin’s Wintergarden takes place at the De La Warr Pavilion on the east coast of England. A modernist architectural masterpiece, one of the architects, Eric Mendelsohn had envisioned a monumental statue of the Greek goddess Persephone to stand alongside the pavilion. This odd coupling of modernist architecture and classical sculpture was never realized, as the Persephone statue was not approved. Fascinated by the proposal for this sculpture, and its potential implications in the context of a Modernist building, Martin creates a modern day Persephone, based on the Greek myth of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who was carried off to the world of the dead by Hades. No longer working just with frozen composition and tableau vivant, choreography and the movement of performers becomes an important element in Wintergarden. ‘My 16mm films aim to create a continuity or parity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Human gesture and seductive imagery meet physically mannered artifice to pry loose viewers’ learned habits of perception. Mistranslation opens holes for imagination to enter or exit.’ DARIA MARTIN All images: Daria Martin, Wintergarden (2005-2011) `bb`dctb`shnm Key works One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt 2010-2011 16 mm film, 32 minutes After viewing Martin’s body of film work and her late grandmother’s dream diaries and painting, the final film in the exhibition One of The Things… layers these works together. Entries from the diaries are read out by the voicless performers featured in Martin’s previous films, combined with outtakes from these ten years’ worth of films. When Martin began working with the dream diaries she explained that ‘This project was created as a way for me to digest the fact of my grandmother’s recent death. She was an amateur painter and a brilliant, deeply introverted intellect. She kept heavy shelves filled with meticulous All images, Daria Martin, One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt (2010-2011) diaries, detailed records of her dreams and years’ worth of notes on her Jungian analysis.