CHRISTINA MARTINELLI

The catalogue for “An Exchange with Sol LeWitt,” curated by Regine Basha, is available now! View it as a free PDF in living color, or purchase the black-and-white physical newsprint book for $10. I have a drawing in the book which was originally on display at Cabinet’s Brooklyn space. Buy this book before books no longer physically exist! Support Cabinet!

PDF : http://cabinetmagazine.org/events/Exchange_with_Sol_LeWitt_Catalogue.pdf

Purchase Here : http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/shop/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=173

Up now in Washington, DC!
G40 opens this Friday – Corner of 14th & Florida
microWave project is working again with Art Whino for *vitamin*water uncapped LIVE featuring Art Whino’s 2nd Annual G40 Art Summit. We’re bringing 18 artists that will transform a DC office building into art itself through site-specific installations.

Thursday May 19 and runs through July 17
2217 14th St. NW (corner of 14th St. & Florida Ave)

(Photo courtesy of Brightest Young Things, a terrific Washington, DC arts organization and blog)

Falling Off the Edge at Open Space Gallery
February 24, 2011 | Peter Boyce
The short essay that accompanies; “Falling Off the Edge”; cites the august Eva Hesse as a precedence. Christina Martinelli presents abstract drawings of remarkable immediacy. Ann Kelly presents works of wry wit and disarming frankness that refer to architecture in their materials and to the body in their scale.

RadarRedux.com

Here are a few snapshots to give a sense of the kinds of sculptures and drawings I’ve been working on in my studio the last two months. Better quality images coming soon:

This week Cara Ober reviewed “Falling Off the Edge” in Urbanite Magazine.
Link Here

Thank you so much Cara Ober!

February 08, 2011 Arts & Culture

*Hot Pursuit *
Falling Off The Edge at Open Space showcases the work of two young sculptors
by Cara Ober

The quintessential “artist’s search” for a work that captures a unique, ephemeral thought is a fitful and frustrating process. Younger artists tend to be the best examples of raw, passionate energy, but their output is typically uneven. Among more mature artists, there are few who can sustain this type of hot and fast intensity for long. For this reason it is rare to encounter strong, professional works in an established gallery that don’t resort to some type of safe repetition of past success. Falling Off the Edge: New Works by Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli at Open Space is a rare opportunity to experience the unbridled energy of young artists who have the training and editing skills to properly harness their ideas.

Ann Kelly’s work emits a youthful optimism and a confident, collage aesthetic. She combines unrelated objects and materials—including stone, wood, concrete, mirrors, and tile—and assembles them in human-sized piles, like wonky obelisks or totem poles. The wide variety of materials keeps her process fresh and helps her to avoid formulaic solutions. “One piece uses rocks and chunks of concrete I collected from the beach below the Brooklyn Bridge,” says the 2010 MICA grad, who now lives in Manhattan. “For another work, I bought a stone for carving from a sculpture store. The stone is Red Raspberry Alabaster.”

No matter which type of material Kelly chooses, one senses that each piece is a swan song: She seems to put all her energy into each one and never uses a material in the same way twice.

While Kelly investigates the ‘thing-ness’ of specific materials, Christina Martinelli makes inquisitive, experimental explorations into a range of mark-making, using India Ink, acrylic, graphite, pencil, charcoal, sandpaper, and even coffee on paper. Martinelli earned a graduate degree from MICA’s Rhinehart School of Sculpture in 2010—and, like Kelly, has since relocated to New York. “I still think of these drawings as sculptures in a sense,” she says.

In a series of small, rectangular pieces, whirling layers of wet and dry marks aggregate into curving forms that resemble galaxies or cellular organisms. “The drawings are points of entry into another place,” Martinelli says. “Its important for me that people can get somewhere by looking at them, but their destination is up to them.”

This is the second Open Space exhibit curated by Neil Reinalda, who is one of the gallery’s founding members. “I was interested in having Ann and Christina show together because their work seems to be at odds with a lot of younger artists’ work, who want to encompass an entire idea in a work, to make a ‘watertight’ argument,” Reinalda says. “Ann and Christina tend towards an open interpretation and let the work stand on its own. I think they both have a lot of faith in art, that art can really be profound and transformative and personal.”

In Baltimore’s cultural landscape, Open Space bridges a gap between the young, warehouse art spaces and the more traditional, commercial galleries, offering professionally curated shows of work that are both challenging and emerging. It was created in the summer of 2009 by a handful of recent MICA graduates in a former Remington auto body shop. Open Space is similar to many artist collectives in that each participant is required to volunteer a number of hours in order to participate in gallery decisions. What makes it unique among collectives is that its members don’t exhibit their own art in the gallery; their role is purely curatorial. All programming decisions are made democratically, after individuals submit proposals for projects.

Reinalda says the gallery has tried to raise the bar for work that is worth exhibiting. “I think good work is good work and we shouldn’t be holding Baltimore to a different standard than other cities,” he says. “It’s like anything… if you think you can do it better you should do it! That’s what makes a healthy cultural scene. I think that was our approach to Open Space… this was how we thought a gallery should be.”

Falling Off The Edge: New Works by Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli will be on display from January 29th – March 6th 2010 at Open Space Gallery, located at 2720 Sisson Street, behind the giant alligator mural.

There Were Ten Tiger’s posted some nice photo’s of the opening of “Falling Off the Edge” at Open Space, Baltimore, MD, Curated by Neal Reinalda. The Drawings are my own and the sculptures are MICA graduate and fellow Greenwich Village kid Ann Kelly’s. Thanks to everyone who came out to the opening and for everyone at Open Space for making this all happen. The Show is up until March 6th if you haven’t checked it out yet.

There Were Ten Tiger’s Photo’s of Falling Off the Edge

Thanks There Were Ten Tigers!

Open Space is pleased to present

Falling Off the Edge: new works by Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli

Curated by Neal Reinalda

January 29th – March 6th 2010

Opening Reception: January 29th 7-11pm

’Me too, I’m a painter’ means: me too, I have a soul, I have feelings to communicate to my fellow-men.” –Jacques Ranciere

In “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” Jacques Ranciere writes, “The virtue of our intelligence is less in knowing than in doing. Knowing is nothing, doing is everything.” It is in this sense that Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli’s works embody a specific intelligence. These works are about doing. They present themselves simultaneously as objects and ideas, as poems. It is, as Ranciere says, “The impossibility of our saying the truth, even when we feel it, [that] makes us speak as poets,.., makes us communicate our feelings and see them shared by other feeling beings.”

By employing everyday materials and heavily abstracted imagery, while never failing to hide their own “hands” as artists, Kelly and Martinelli’s works are expressive without irony or kitsch. They engage the possibility of “universal experience” with sensitivity and sincerity. Mondrian wrote “art is…the direct expression of the universal in us – which is the exact appearance of the universal outside us.” It’s this direct expression of the universal that these works approach in their confusion of art and life. In conversation with Cindy Nemster, Eve Hesse speaks of this confusion:

“[People say] you can’t confuse life and art. But I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is an essence, a soul … in my inner soul art and life are inseparable. It becomes more absurd and less absurd to isolate a basically intuitive idea and then work up some calculated system and follow it through – that supposedly being the more intellectual approach – than giving precedence to soul or presence or whatever you want to call it … For me it’s a total image that has to do with me and life. It can’t be divorced as an idea or composition or form.”

This confusion of things is what makes these works vibrant, daring, and challenging. They refuse to function on a singular plane. We should as Rainciere says, “learn near those who have worked in the gap between … the silent language of emotion and the arbitrariness of the spoken tongue, near those who have tried to give voice to the silent dialogue the soul has within itself, who have gambled all their credibility on the bet of the similarity of minds.”

Perhaps Cindy Nemster put it best as she interviewed Eva Hesse:

EH: So I am stuck with esthetic problems. But I want to reach out past…I want to give greater significance to my art. I want to extend my art perhaps into something that doesn’t exist yet…

CN: Like falling off the edge?

EH: That’s a nice way of saying it. Yes, I would like to do that.

A show I was in at the Baltimore Annex Theater curated by the amazing Michael Farley was recently picked by City Paper as number ten on its list of top ten Baltimore art shows of 2010. Link to the list below:

City Paper : The Year in Art

Open Space is pleased to present
new works by Ann Kelly and Christina Martinelli
January 29th – March 6th 2010
Opening Reception: January 29th 7-11pm

http://www.openspacebaltimore.com/

I’m in the process of adding new images to the website, particularly to the drawing section. There should be a good number of new images (and some improved quality images) up in that section by the end of this week. Also stay tuned for more information about the upcoming Open Space (Baltimore) two person show thanks to the amazing Neal Reinalda…