Brandi Martin

 Brandi Martin uses poetry to inform her art. She says, "The slurry grammar of the social networking used to bother me. But soon I found myself wanting to do the same. Why? I found that complete thoughts were drained of emotion. Phrased like evocative definitions of an unnamed something, in the voice of the second person, this shredding of language denies the academic third person; it feels visceral.  

I tried diagramming it old school style. Breaking it up and rebuilding it again felt educational and metaphorical at the same time. 

The ongoing nature of how we change language as it changes us. The fixed rules are actually temporal, and it’s our play with language as it flows past us that really remakes it.  A few words on a card cut off from a sentence is poignant, it could end any way, we easily insert our lives into just three words. Less gives more. The fragmented sentences and phrases in my works are not broken instead of whole, they are open instead of closed. Every day we break the authority of text- and the shards aren’t the waste; they are how we enter into the conversation."

Brandi Martin's research-based practice delves into the the quiet crises of analysis and translation. Her work challenges the authority of any singular medium or moment by transparently layering imagery, media, and time. 

Martin classifies these works as ‘metacognitive objects’. Connections and conflicts between self-referential elements create a rich friction for extended engagement, highlighting the viewers’ own thought processes. 

Inspired by the poetry and mechanics of instructional methods, as well as the evocative qualities of found objects, Martin's most recent work refers to the photographic canon, the use of second person voice as applied to art, the poetics of broken language in ‘memes’, and searching out the indexical trace in the mundane.

Brandi Martin holds an MFA From the School of Visual arts in NYC. She makes sculpture, video, images and installations that struggle to resolve conflicting narratives. Brandi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is the recipient of residency awards in Gorna Lipitsa, Bulgaria (funded by the Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Arts Programme of the EEA) and The Bridgeguard Residency between the Mária Valéria bridge between Štúrovo, Slovakia, and Esztergom, Hungary (funded by the Štefan and Viera Frühauf Endowment Fund).