Press

Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz
The Frigid Zone

Academia Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition featuring the collaborative work of Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz.

In their most recent series of photographs and objects, Martin and Munoz subvert the cheerful conventions of the snowglobe with dark ruminations. The typical snowglobe winter wonderlands are supplanted by desolate and sometimes sinister snowscapes. Forests of dead trees traversed by solitary figures laden with suitcases. The characters seem dressed for a more civilized sort of commute, their business attire ill suited for wading through deep snow and biting cold. It seems as if they were collectively caught off guard by some series of events and forced from their familiar habitat into a harsh and premature exile.

Ultimately it is left to the viewer to speculate about possible narratives. The artists concern was more general. These scenes encased in glass and water each represent an attempt to in some way encapsulate, isolate, and illuminate a certain form of human dread associated with the unexpected and the obvious but often ignored inevitabilities of mortality. In a sense the figures in the globes become stand-ins for us; their nomadic isolation a metaphor for our own sense of unknown origins and unknowable destinations.