Deborah Martin’s luminous and provocative style of realism contemplates the vestiges of American life on the edge in her latest exhibition, “Wonder Valley”.
Her painted depictions of remnants and relics of this quasi ghost valley settlement of homesteads born out of a 1938 Federal Land Grant comprise a portrait of a place in metamorphosis.
Intimately coupled with the weathering austerities of the Mojave Desert, these outposts of human habitation exhibit an obvious struggle for survival
Martin showcases a frontier of existential befuddlement: a seemingly confused pondering whether to persist, give up or renew amidst the trappings of domicile.
The rise and fall of opportunity, hope and longing present themselves, eerily, in these paintings.
The question looms whether an insubordinate Wild West is staging a mockery over the American materialist fantasy.
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Poised in an arid netherworld between strip malls and car lots, WONDER VALLEY lies just beyond the vacant, shuttered stare of the American Dream. Commercialism gnaws at the edges of this desert mountain wilderness - its embattled landscape of ragged palms, mountains, and eroding homestead cabins provides austere refuge to semi-nomadic enclaves of fringe-toed lizards, kangaroo rats, idiosyncratic visionaries and anachronistic loners.
In WONDER VALLEY, Martin immortalizes a 21st century desert struggle against destruction, and her lamentation for the disappearing landscape is also a praise song to the improbable power of endurance, tenacity, and longing.
Painter Deborah Martin has established a compelling dominion as portraitist of an archaic America – ravaged sites and forgotten wastelands that nonetheless resist destruction. Her luminous paintings and photographs reveal the beauty in the bleak, and speak to the tenuous balance between home, depravation, isolation, community and hope.
--Quintan Ana Wikswo
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