From LACMA: Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today's visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.

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From Detroit Artists Market:
Explore the incredible world of Detroit photographers past, present and future. Through the eyes of these artists, our own eyes are opened to the extraordinary. Detroit has a rich history in art and documentary photography to which new makers are continually adding. This show brings together works from a wide range of remarkably gifted photographers in our community, including some who have left us. We are privileged to have the world illuminated by these individuals and their insights.  

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Suraj Bhamra, Sarah C. Blanchette, Brittanie Bondie, Elonte Davis, Brian Day, Carlos Diaz, Jon Dones, Andrea Eis, Walter Farynk, Misha Gordin, Hugh Grannum, Cynthia Greig, David Griffith, Don Hudson, Lonnell Hurst, Jaclyn Iskow, Bill Jackson, Takeisha Jefferson, Ralph Jones, Shanna Merola, James Charles Morris, Eleanor Oakes, Jimel Primm, Bill Rauhauser, Barry Roth, Amy Sacka, Bill Sanders, Christopher Schneider, Donita Simpson, Leni Sinclair, Thomas Stoye, Rachel Elise Thomas, Millee Tibbs, Carl Toth, Martin Venezky, Noah Waldeck, Asha Walidah, Niki Williams, Cherry Wood, S. Kay Young

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Dear Young Artists and Designers:

I’m sorry to say this, but curiosity is in trouble. It seems that, these days, every thing stands for something else rather than being about the thing itself. A picture of a tree is no longer about the tree. It merely replaces the word “tree” as a symbol of one thing or another (strength?  growth?  nature?) rather than enrapturing us with the way a tree actually is. See it. Name it. Forget it. Move on.  

Flip through Instagram and you will find yourself reciting, “sunset,” “ocean,” “cat,” “baby” and so on.   Few surprises, because we name everything we see out of habit.   For me curiosity insists that I stop naming what I am seeing.1  That sounds easy, but it is not. Try it.  

Can we ever look at a thing as if we have never seen it before? Before language? Can we enjoy what we cannot name? Can we make something without it having to be “about” something? It takes so much work to make something that simply is about itself, and we have so little time. But you are artists and you are young!

I love round things and things that spin on an axis. So do you. So does the camera. I like cardboard boxes. So do cats. And a camera, like a cat, is curious because it doesn’t know what it is looking at (or jumping into).   And until now, neither did the computer.  (I wish we could keep it that way, but that’s a story for another time.)  

I collect things that I know nothing about, often from thrift stores and recycling centers.   And I love mixing my finds with other things I know nothing about.   And then watching it all tumble over and fall down.  (Sorry about the noise, Katie!)

For the past three months I have taken photographs of these things and made marks on paper. Sometimes both at the same time on the same surface. Both are types of recording, and both reveal traces of what once was but isn’t now. Objects once confronted each other like this, and my body once moved along this certain path. That’s really all there is. But what a world we can build out of such simple things!  

You are not cats or round spinning things. You are humans. And because of that, you can enjoy looking and thinking, making without knowing, studying and leaving traces. What in the world delights you? Find that thing. Be alert. Take notes. Help curiosity survive.  

Martin Venezky
Artist-in-Residence
Fall 2024

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Los Raros. Las Raras : New Narratives of Contemporary Collage is a space that directs its gaze towards the present and the future. It seeks to redefine the boundaries of contemporary collage, exploring answers to fundamental questions such as: What is the essence of collage? What forms has collage taken in contemporary art? How has it crossed the border of art to become a popular cultural tool? Adopting a critical approach, the exhibition questions conventional categories, exploring answers both in artistic discourse and in the practice of collage.

In 2023 the Detroit Artists Market focused on students from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Among the exhibiting finalists, I was selected Best in Show and received one of the John F. Korachis Scholarships.

The International Typography Poster Exhibition, organized by Chang Kim in Ulsan, South Korea, has traveled to Galeria Retroavangarda in Warsaw, Poland. The exhibition, retitled “Letter & Image: Typographic Odyssey,” includes my poster, ZZZZRRHU (Feeling Better), the first time my work has been shown in the country of my ancestry.

A selection from my New Machinery series was included in the expansive survey exhibition With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932. The exhibition, curated by museum director and Cranbrook alumnus Andrew Blauvelt, filled the museum’s galleries with over 250 works representing all periods of all departments at the Academy. The exhibition included a monumental and definitive catalog and history of the school’s impact and accomplishments.

James Chae, a South Korean designer and educator, organized an exhibition concerning the intersection of music and design. Each participant listened to the same 45-minute instrumental composition and then responded to it with a poster design. I opted for a trio of posters each based on a 15 minute passage of the music. Chae also published the first issue of Pudding Magazine which showcased the works in the show plus portfolios and articles about each of the participating artists.

As an invited artist, I designed this large A0 poster for the International Typography Poster Exhibition. This year's theme was “Letter and Image.”
My poster is titled ZZZZRRHU (Feeling Better). Last year's gloom gives way to a colorful shimmering optimism. But wait... is adding glitter on top of nonsense a sign of hope or deceipt?

From the gallery website:

From the confines of the physical world, Anna Bogatin Ott and Martin Venezky extract tangible elements to build a new plane of existence that is familiar and fantastical at once; their works transcend the conventional notion of photography as an emanation of reality. Both artists abstract materiality into other-worldly realms with their own aesthetical language and structures.
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Venezky uses physically scavenged pieces of metal, glass, plastic and toys to form his series “The New Machinery.” As still-lives modeled and sculpted by complex lighting, these extraordinary compositions are transformed into machine-like objects straight out of science fiction. Their stark, black and white presence contrasts with Anna’s colorful representations. Both bodies of works energize an invigorating dialogue in the ever-evolving medium of photography.

“We Have Been Where You Are Going,” a collaborative project with Barbara Levine, exhibited a part of the gallery’s Control+P series.

The biannual Bay Area Currents moved online for 2020.
My newest work for The New Machinery series was featured in the exhibition.

In 2019, my class, “Form Studio” celebrated its twentieth anniversary as a key component of my teaching and philosophy. What began as an experimental undergraduate elective at California College of the Arts (CCA) has since become a cornerstone of our graduate studio curriculum. The exhibition, curated and designed by Martin Venezky and Jon Sueda at San Francisco’s Institute of Advanced Uncertainty, gathered together student work, sets of materials used in the teaching, and included a program of lectures and demonstrations.

From exhibition website:

This exhibition features five contemporary artists whose work questions and extends photography in surprising ways. The exhibition’s title is a nod to the influential book The Edge of Vision by Lyle Rexer, which presents numerous artists working at the boundaries of lens-based practices. In this time of ubiquitous images and familiar pictures, these artists find novel pathways to meaning through invention, play, and subversion of the medium’s long held conventions.

Nineteen prints from The New Machinery were exhibited at the Camerawork Gallery.

Untitled No. 21 from “The New Machinery” was selected as part of the exhibition, “Abstract,” opening  November 2018 in Fort Collins, Colorado. Big thanks to juror Elizabeth Houston from Elizabeth Houston Gallery in New York.

The New Machinery No. 24 was selected by juror Jean Dykstra for the Center for Fine Art Photography’s  exhibition “Wonder.”

The New Machinery made its wide public debut at the San Francisco International Airport in 2018. Curator Kai Caemmerer selected eight images from my ongoing series to feature in one of Terminal 3’s pre-security galleries. The exhibition is on display from July 12 through October 18, 2018. You can read the SFO press release here.

Bay Area Currents is a juried exhibition sponsored by San Francisco’s Photo Alliance. An image from my series The New Machinery was selected for inclusion.

“What I Know About Photography,” designed and curated by Jon Sueda at San Francisco State University, surveys the full extent of my personal photographic journey. The exhibition reaches all the way back to my very first camera, my own photographic re-education at Cranbrook, my collected vernacular snapshots, wall installations, constructions, and the ongoing series, “The New Machinery.”

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It was a terrific honor to see all of this history gathered together, reconnect with friends and colleagues from both design and photography, and consider this as a launching pad for further exploration. Currently in the works is a full catalog of the exhibition, designed and edited by Jon Sueda and featuring contributions from a roster of insightful thinkers and writers.

Jon Sueda also edited, designed and produced this 144-page catalog. As Sueda describes it, “the exhibition aims to highlight a parallel practice, investigating how a designer can have multiple lines of inquiry during a career that can not only be woven together, but appreciated in proximity to one another. The book includes over 100 images made between 1991 to the present, including snapshots, found photography, collage, and his most recent body of work titled ‘The New Machinery.’” The book includes a series of interviews, conversations and essays by Rudy Vanderlans, Andy Mattern, Jon Sueda and Emily McVarish.

Every Corner Vibrates Like Art is the final work to be shown at the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Grove Street Gallery. Composed of hundreds of individual 4x6 color prints plus a selection of larger black & white images, this work is put together with push pins on four 4ft x 8ft easels. The work was installed in the four street level windows of the gallery to announce its closing and the opening of SFAC’s new gallery a few blocks away.

Student Collaboration on an 8ft x 24ft photo installation

ADOBE SYSTEMS invited me to install a massive 30-foot-long wall collage inside their San Francisco headquarters. The individual pieces were all taken from my collection of paper ephemera, photo and type studies, and print ephemera. There are even a few new pieces that I collected on my walks between my office on Bryant Street and the Adobe headquarters on Townsend Street, a few blocks away.

A short video documentary about the installation.

The full time-lapse of my wall collage installation.

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A Song! A Song!, installed at San Francisco’s SOMArts Gallery was commissioned by Jon Sueda as part of his “All Possible Futures” exhibition. The free-standing wall collage measures 10’3″ tall x 7’6″ wide and is composed of digital photoprints adhered to the wall with pushpins. All the photographs were created in-camera using ordinary materials stockpiled in my studio: glass, paper, plastic, and so on. Up to this point my photo  work had been confined to my own studio walls or created exclusively for design projects. This is the first time I had created a wall like this for the public, and the first time all of the photographs were made specifically for a single installation.

Martin Venezky: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design was organized by Darrin Alfred, curatorial associate, and Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture, design, and digital projects.

I was included in the first National Design Triennial, curated by Ellen Lupton, Donald Albrecht, and Steven Skov Holt.

10ft x 7.5ft freestanding installation, curated by Jon Sueda for his exhibition, All Possible Futures