Next Chapter

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago and Transmitter, a collaborative curatorial initiative based in Brooklyn, New York, are pleased to present Next Chapter, a solo exhibition featuring work by Victoria Martinez. Next Chapter is part of #ArtistRun2020, a year-long exploration of artist-run spaces organized by Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Trestle Gallery.

Victoria Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist who creates fiber-based projects that extend into installation and painting. Next Chapter is a site-responsive installation and a journey into Martinez’s next stage of mark-making through abstract paintings and object based works. Her practice is attuned to color, geometry, and found objects, and is rooted in a long-term commitment to observing the urban environment. 

Martinez’s work explores landscapes, systems of power, and archiving particular sites as a form of honoring histories. In her abstractions, there are portals of reimagining spaces and memories as well as embracing alternative methods of map making. This is most notable in the material layers and textured textiles that are painted and transformed into an intuitive language. 

On view as part of the large-scale installation are cut doorways that reveal a double-sided painting and enter a space of maps re-envisioning quotidian items and the body. Other works explore the grid that is embodied in city streets, murals, and buildings repeating patterns that become timeless. The brick sculptures sourced from a demolition at Dvorak Park in the Pilsen neighborhood, where the artist is originally from, are reconstructed into an archive that salvages the very sites that are being destroyed through gentrification projects in Chicago. 

In Next Chapter, Martinez shares her observations of navigating the urban landscape and invites the audience to observe a new body of work based on a walking ritual that informs the industrial materiality and creates a new grounding for the artist. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and the Hyde Park Art Center Artists Run Chicago Fund. 

Artist Bio 
Victoria Martinez was born in 1987 in Chicago, IL. She received her B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2010 and an M.F.A. From Yale University School of Art in 2020. Martinez has exhibited nationally and internationally including the Yale University Art Gallery, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Loyola University Museum of Art, and her work has been critically appraised in Poetry Foundation Magazine and The University of Chicago Press. She is a recipient of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Research Fellowship from Yale University, Michigan Avenue Galleries Grant from the Chicago Cultural Center, and an Enrichment Grant from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she currently teaches in the Fiber and Materials Studies Department. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles in California, and an art feature in New American Paintings.