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Martin Venezky

www.martinvenezky.com

The New Machinery 2019

The New Machinery is a form of photographic science fiction. The work references the barely visible mechanisms that surround our everyday life, often camouflaged and embedded in digital software. I provide seductive and sinister physicality to the networks that charm their way into our lives while surveilling our movements and collecting our data. As we look at them they are most certainly looking back at us. These images are pieced together from material and light studies that I perform on scavenged and disassembled tools, toys, materials and appliances. I am interested in how the camera crunches these small parts down further into gestures of light and elements of structure. This generative process breaks apart the complicated act of seeing into small units — building blocks with which I construct large scale physical compositions. Perhaps these machines have quietly evolved from mountains of discarded hardware — parts finding each other and forming intimate relationships. In the same way, each image develops slowly in an additive, analog process whose logic and narrative begins with the smallest interior detail and grows outward. I’ve labeled these contraptions The New Machinery as a nod towards the recycled materials and the machine-like logic in their creation and perception. Cobbled together from discarded utilitarian parts, their presence invites inspection while their function remains inscrutable.