Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present a screening and discussion lead by artist and educator Darrin Martin, whose video, performance, and print-based installations have considered the synesthetic qualities of perception, and notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies, and audio descriptions.

Beginning in 2010, Martin started to explore EAI’s collection with two goals in mind: to search for disability representation, and in pursuit of experimental video work that considers disability access at its inception—even if it might not have been the impetus for its making. As an extension of this project, Martin has assembled a program of works by six artists whose practices span from early conceptual video to contemporary performance, each uniquely engaging the themes of perceptual difference, semiotic play, and embodiment. This event will feature open captioning and live ASL interpretation. A free, closed-captioned online streaming version of this event will be available in mid-April.

Darrin Martin creates videos and installations that engage qualities of perception mediated through the lens of both obsolete and new technologies. His latest projects consider ways in which meaning is layered and performative using sonic analogies and audio descriptions. Through collaborations with artist Torsten Zenas Burns, they build speculative fictions around re-imagined educational practices and dystopian cosplay paradigms. Martin is a Professor in the Art and Art History Department at University California, Davis.

Martin writes: “The works in (Mis)Reading the Image are never what they appear to be at face value and/or have found new perspectives within and against each other in time. Their relationship to language, text, and image is built upon shifts in context whether through the performative work of Wu Tsang embodying the words of a late autism rights activist Mel Baggs, an attempt to audio describe images removed from newspaper clippings in John Baldessari’s The Meaning of Various News Photos to Ed Henderson, or in the stuttering poetic plea of Cecilia Vicuña’s emotional summary of a film that rings the alarm over specific man-made environmental catastrophes. Woven throughout the program are selections from Phyllis Baldino’s Absence is Present which manifests her experience with a blind spot and two works from Lawrence Andrews’ Selections from the Library, which take the approach of building an image within the viewer using text and sound that resists simple approaches to reification. Finally, Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 6 places the viewer as witness to the trajectory of her alter ego Cynthia’s attempt to find wholeness in a world of image fragmentation and missing pieces.

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