Stacked Artifacts

In moments of upheaval, the ghosts of images from the past take on new relevance. Histories repeat themselves but in distorted form, refracted by the breaks between eras, the breaks between eras, the differences between their media, and their distinct understandings of the world.

Darrin Martin’s exhibition of remixed archival video and sculptural works, Stacked Artifacts explores these dynamics with particular attention to queer histories - both personal and collective - reflecting on the past in light of the promise and perils of the present, grappling with loss and change, and struggling to situate these histories within the broader assemblage of reality.

Works in the show are threaded together, formally, by their common engagement with the degradation of the moving image, hinging on the paradox in media and its artifacts, i.e., that their obsolescence and failure to remain faithful to the past simultaneously opens them up to unexpected combinations and novel interpretations, contributing to the realization of unanticipated futures.
In a large, two-channel video projection, spanning the gallery’s walls, Darrin collages together processed and damaged home movies, vintage gay porn, documentary agricultural videos, and a Cold War fiction film about the end of the world. Another piece presents a floral arrangement living and dying in a seamless loop, interrupted only by taffy-like jumps in time that stagger the changes in the flowers’ vitality and decay. A third piece features a thin, door-like relief with carved geometric patterns, extending onto the floor in segments mounted with video screens.

Whether in three-dimensional objects or as moving-images that wrap the gallery’s architecture, Darrin presents media and memory not merely as cognitive instruments, but as integral to the fabric of lived experience. His works are psychological interiorities, comprised of layered, shifting images and associations. They are bodies marked by age and experience, preserving traces of the past in the texture of their flesh. Rich with meaning and memory, they are rooms and social contexts, layered across time, marked by loss, and open to rediscovery.