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What I'm Thinking About:​

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Preoccupied with ephemerality, my practice reaches for the intuited ‘something more’ that resists fixed representation. Through installation and performance, private rituals are recreated as playgrounds for discovery.  In these spaces, one might explore their responses and reactions to the formal presentation of the subverted social imaginary, where my stories and their stories, combine into something new. Something about redemption.  Sometimes a talisman remains.

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BIO

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April Marten (b.1969) works across media including sculpture, installation, performance art, video, and book arts.

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Born and raised in Miami, FL, Marten’s artistic practice developed out of her personal experiences with—and, ultimately, her break with inherited religious fundamentalism.  Her performative approach extends from the referent while quoting from our culture’s hyperrealities, including fairy-tales, grand narrative ideologies, religious myths, and the manufactured desire of consumer culture. Using what she calls a 'candy-coated aesthetic to cover deep existential concern,' Marten invites others to engage in active imagination while establishing their own thoughtful, visionary relationship with the material world and what exists just beyond.

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Marten’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in her first New York City solo exhibition at Monica King Contemporary, and at art fairs, art institutions and virtual exhibitions including Untitled Miami, FL, Artpowher Contemporary, Zurich, Switzerland, Spring Break Art Fair, New York, NY,  Foley Gallery, New York, NY; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Bechtler Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, GA; Anne Rudd Galyon and Irene Cullis Galleries at Greensboro College, Greensboro, NC, and Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, Davidson, NC, among others. In 2018, she completed a residency at The McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, NC.

 

Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Popular Photography, ArtNet News, Observer, and Galerie Magazine, among others.Her work is in the collections of University of Tennessee, Women's Impact Fund, Zuckerman Museum at Kennesaw State University, University of North Carolina Charlotte, and in private collections across the world.

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