Martin Venezky, with his firm Appetite Engineers, is dedicated to craft, process and detail while colliding the handmade with the digital. In 2001, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art honored Venezky with a solo exhibition, and his monograph, It Is Beautiful…Then Gone, is published by Princeton Architectural Press. Venezky has produced illustrations for the New York Times and Wired, and installations at the Silicon Valley Facebook and Adobe campuses. Recently, his book design for the wildly popular Wes Anderson Collection has earned him new fans. His recent experiments in abstraction have resulted in new bodies of work in photography, drawing, and installation.
Venezky earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has taught at California College of the Arts since 1993, where he is currently Professor in the Graduate Design Program. In 2015 he was inducted into the esteemed Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).
THE NEW MACHINERY
The contraptions presented in The New Machinery, a new series of constructed works, are amalgamations of parts. Their presence is mysterious and seductive, and while logic is implied, their function remains inscrutable.
The machinery’s components are all material and light studies photographed from discarded objects—obsolete glass samples, disassembled machine parts, plastic toys, whose imperfections record their well-handled history. Drawings and markings created alongside these objects are photographed as well.
I am exploring photography as an additive, analog process. These individual studies are my raw materials which I piece together, overlapping and underlapping them into active, sculptural space. In a final step, I translate the physical construction back into digital form. The picture's content arises as the relationship between the parts develops, and the pieces are as likely to clash as they are to melt into each other.
This new machinery is neither stable nor fixed. As the hardware becomes more elusive and enigmatic, their sinister potential increases; and their ability to create communities of control around us but not with us, expands.
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