Leslie Martinez: Thrashing on the Mooring Mast at And Now

As the pandemic rages on, patrons have found only a few brave socially distanced openings at a smattering of galleries this summer. So it’s a rare treat for the art-starved when an exhibition mirrors the reexamination of materiality and interconnectedness while peeling back the complexities of our borders. McAllen-born, Dallas artist Leslie Martinez, newly represented by James Cope at And Now, mines their cross-border roots of the Rio Grande Valley and crisis control in Thrashing on the Mooring Mast. 

PATRON (P): You’ve described your studio as “a processing plant, incinerator, or crucible” which appears essential to your highly worked canvases on display at And Now. What role does alchemy play in your practice? And did your experience at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art spur this interest in exploring reactions to material Processing?

Leslie Martinez (LM): The Cooper Union consisted of an art school, an architecture school, and an engineering school, but there wasn’t actually a lot of explicit cross pollination between art and science. I did take a class on optics and another on 18th century science in which we read Isaac Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. That’s where I became interested in spectral color and focal length as a metaphor for how materials can be manipulated to appear and shift at different distances. Alchemy came into play less explicitly. In the School of Art at Cooper Union, it was stressed that we should not be precious about things that we liked in our work if everything else wasn’t working–that letting go propels you faster and deeper toward the essence of what you’re really after which is what alchemists were trying to do. Scientific and alchemical language have always provided the perfect structural language for the holistic power abstraction has when experienced openly with regard to time, material, and process. In my first year at Yale, which was 8 years after graduating from Cooper Union, alchemy and hermeticism were brought up in studio visits in relation to this destructive way of working, where a failed attempt rolls into a new one. But alchemy also relates to the fact that I mix my own paints to fit my vision. If I want something shiny and cracked, I set out to mix up a paint that will do that for me. 

P: How do materials enter your studio? With a zero-waste mindset, I would imagine each object is chosen carefully before it enters the studio space.

LM: It’s less careful and more circumstantial. It’s about what is available and self-generating. For example, I use jersey or terry cloth rags to clean up when I’m working. Instead of throwing them away, I come up with different ways they can be processed into smaller pieces or sewn together and cut down again. Some of this material processing has gone on for years. In the paintings in this show, some materials are embedded with memories from Yale, my time in Arizona, or when I first moved back to Dallas at the end of 2018. In this way of working, the mundane is imbued with value and the practical tradeoff is that I’m maintaining a low footprint. Even rotted wastewater gets its chance since throwing acrylic wastewater down the drain isn’t good. I’ll let it sit in buckets to evaporate or until I can reuse it to stain materials. The way the water separates from the pigments can be very interesting. 

P: Though you were raised in Dallas, you were born in the Rio Grande Valley. In what way, if any, do your transborder roots play out in the exhibition’s title Thrashing on the Mooring Mast, which you’ve stated references a border patrol blimp? 

LM: I feel like I was raised on the road between Dallas and the Rio Grande Valley in terms of how the contrast between the two has shaped the way I understand the world. My parents are the only people on both sides of the family that left the region so we’ve always remained deeply tethered. It’s about a 10-hour drive to and from the Valley which makes for a very long meditation on the ways that everything slowly shifts, from landscape, economy, architecture, demographics, and even constitutional rights. Living below the U.S. checkpoint, as many know, means that you’re in a constant state of surveillance. If you’re on a road, you often can’t look in any direction (not even the sky) without seeing some form of a watchful eye. You never really shake off the sense that you’re inherently suspicious for simply existing. One of the last times I was there last winter on the way back to Dallas, I saw a CBP blimp shoot up past a tree line and abruptly crash back down several times. It was enormous and out of control like a lassoed calf. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that something so ominous that looms from above so slowly, thrashes against the forces that tie it down to earth. I titled the show after this experience because it was a gestural and material manifestation of the feeling of a lack of control that I think we’re all experiencing in 2020.

P: In these four paintings you’ve used jersey shop rags, terrycloth rags, coarse ballast, tree branches, hospital bedsheets along with paper pulp and acrylic. Did you begin with conceptual groundwork before gathering the materials to start these works?

LM: Yes, but not in regard to the materials themselves. For these it was more about a gestural desire. I think about these materials as part of a textural diversity that feels chaotic or nonsensical but familiar at the same time. I wanted a feeling of non-descript debris, like a disaster has taken place and the wreckage has been touched by time, or wind or water. 

It’s more about a feeling I want to achieve through how certain materials hold their form and what happens when they hold paint. There’s a poetic looseness in the way I approach work, I have to be surprised by my work too, and for it to take me somewhere and teach me something I want to explore further down the line. 

P: In Fallout Speed on a Wide Expanse, which traces back to your drives to and from your studio especially on the stretch of Spur 408, the white paint hints toward a sense of speed through the way it cascades. In what way do you address misinterpretation in your practice?

LM: I’m always interested in work that challenges your perception as you approach it. I always catch myself driving too fast on 408. 90 mph feels like 40 if everyone else is going 90 because the peripheral view is so wide even if everyone else is driving the same speed. It’s much like the distortion that occurs through political tribalism when you just go with the flow without ever questioning if certain things you believe actually make sense. I think of smooth surfaces on a painting as places where paint and water can cascade, and textured ones where it can break the speed of that flow. Misinterpretation, misrepresentation, misidentification occur in the subtlest ways regarding the actuality of material and how various ways of applying paint can challenge the perception of the surface. What feels weathered or sanded away is often applied or lightly touched to trick the eye–subtractive gestures may actually be additive ones. Lack of a consistent direction is also important in the work. You don’t always get a sense that a painting was made in one orientation the whole time, and as a maker, there is meaning in genuine heartfelt meaning in all of that. 

P: You’ve indicated that language informs your work. In Pour Shadows into Valleys—Dust Light on the High Reliefs, which sounds like the title of a beautiful piece of prose, the work is derived from notes you’ve written to yourself. While “shadow” and “valley” echoes Psalm 23, especially in light of the pandemic, does this painting address the modern-day isolation we may feel through disparate cultural, religious, racial and/or partisanship concerns? Or the crisis control you referenced?

LM: I wanted this whole body of work to mark this ominous and distorted sense of time. I think everyone regardless of their identities, in some way or another, are very confused about what is reality and what is illusion regarding current events as well as history. Throughout all of the paintings, but very specifically this one, I wanted to get a really strong sense of storminess – a dark cloud of deception pressing down or moving over, or a creeping moldiness, smoke, burning, or rotting. I think the fracturing that this country is experiencing is rooted very deeply in the desire to understand the structural nature of deception in order to truly orient ourselves in time and space. Crisis control refers specifically to the pandemic as well as climate and environmental disasters, as well as the refusal to honestly address the historical foundation of this country. In these paintings planes and perspectives are absent, leaving only perception and the desire to find something that answers for everything else.

P: The painting Ribs of the Disaster Gates Pass, references Adrienne Rich’s poem Diving into the Wreck. In the poem, Rich describes feelings of aloneness and writes “the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty” reveals the ribs of disaster. In many ways, these works demonstrate just that with the reuse of discards into a more enlightened form. Does your process take you through these notions of identity and self-discovery?

LM: The process of making paintings does take me through identity and self-discovery, and vice-versa. My work always finds a way to distill the internal, or personal with the external or conditions of the world at large. Certain decisions regarding language/process hint toward reduction, evaporation, suction, or cinching, especially in this painting. “Salt and Sway” is like the watery version of the effects of sand and wind on fabric or plastic on a desert floor. The fabrics that secure the branches appear to sort of vacuum-form them to the surface the way skin and garments sink around the ribs of a mummy or skeleton. I was in Tucson, Arizona for three months early last year and I thought of this poem in the middle of the Saguaro National Park near Gates Pass because the internal structure of these large cacti, when they die, look like enormous ribs. Aside from these lines of Rich’s poem, I thought about the precise Arc-like measurement of a whale’s skeleton that was described in Moby Dick. There was a way that the whale is analyzed much like the shipwreck in Rich’s poem. There’s something interesting about poetics at the time coming together around literature about the sea but in the desert.

P: With consideration to the pandemic, do you feel like we are all thrashing while we hold onto shreds of normalcy like a mast? What role does your practice play, if any, as documentarian during this unprecedented modern-day crisis? 

LM: Yes, for the most part I do think we’re holding on to shreds of normalcy but more for the sake of feeling like everything is going to be okay. In many ways I think we’re actually thrashing against the structures that simply made us feel secure when we really never were. Maybe we can’t really do what we were used to, but it’s the perfect time to expand into new forms of being. I for one make myself fluid and act like a buoy in weird times. I always know how to adapt and luckily, as an artist, quarantine is perfect for me, though I hate to feel that way when it’s hell for others who are experiencing loss and financial duress. I always want my work to mark the time in very deep but nuanced ways so I do feel like a documentarian of feeling. With the work in this show, I really wanted to make sure these paintings held the anger, confusion, and sadness, but also ease and elation. 2020 is complex for how we can hold horror and bliss together in one hand.

Catch Thrashing on the Mooring Mast through August 29 at And Now Gallery, located in River Bend at 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 207, Dallas, TX 75207. andnow.biz