Frankie Martin
in your dreamz, Feb 16 – Mar 25, 2007

CANADA is proud to present in your dreamz, our first solo show of work by Frankie Martin. Born into the family of friends and collaborators, Paper rad, Corey Archangel, Jim Drain, Assume Vivid Astro Focus and Erika Somogyi, Ms. Martin emerges as a unique and important voice. Ms. Martin styles her own fears and fantasies into meta-therapy-craft portraits, sculpture, video and live performance, all are part of this exhibition. Her unabashed focus on the female body is perversely contradicted by an innocence that can only be found children. Martin is childhood molester and a babysitter and a sexpot - Hanna Wilke meets Hanna-Barbera. This all combines with a strong formal sensibility and a relentless capacity for dark humor; Martin's work is a rich and complicated landscape.

The bulk of the "painting" is what Martin refers to as "facescapes". Rectilinear faces made from stitched and stretched fabric with slight paint accents and fabric hair. They are like small Sergei Jensen paintings bled free of all gravitas. Two large paintings entitled golden light shower 4 u and the stinker (i pooped a rainbow 4 u) are self portraits rendered with paint, tie dye, stitchery and beading. These are the iconic masterworks much like Gustave Klimt's Danae Mating with Zeus or Devine eating dog shit in Pink Flamingos.

Love, fear, worry, the light, the act of movement, are the basic human activities she sees through a lens of self help and pop culture without being heady, clever or lame. Ms. Martin states "this is life changing art about life changing!". Not only lo-fi/lo-tech, it is low everything. Illustrated by the basest bodily references and a no fear stance with potty humor, the lower she goes, the richer the work becomes without glamorizing the abject. She addresses prosaic subcultures, reforms them through her own freak therapy, in turn detoxifying herself on you.

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