Martin Azevedo - If Destruction Be Our Lot

M A RT I N A ZE V EDO I f De s tr u c ti o n Be O u r Lo t

MARTIN AZEVEDO I f De s tr u c ti o n Be O u r Lo t

300 copies printed Martin Azevedo If Destruction Be Our Lot October 1–27, 2016

Art Space on Main Department of Art School of the Arts California State University, Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus

Copyright © 2016 California State University, Stanislaus All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

Catalog design and production: Brad Peatross, School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus Catalog printing: Claremont Print, Claremont, CA Catalog photography: Courtesy of the artist.

Photographs included are used under the permission of the artist.

ISBN: 978–1–940753–22–5

CONTE N T S Director’s Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Artist’s Bio and Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Essay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Prints. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Curriculum Vitae. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

D IRE C TO R ’S FO R E WORD If Destruction Be Our Lot represents a fortuitous chance to view the recent work of my colleague Martin Azevedo. An accomplished printmaker and educator, Martin has joined the Stan State Art Department and brought a new energy and perspective that has elevated the printmaking department to one of the best in the country. This is the first time I have had the opportunity to work with Martin on an exhibition of his work. To my delight and surprise his new body of work is much more than just printmaking. His new work engages new ideas and medias that suit his work and expand it to a whole new level, which I highly respect and admire.

I am very excited to be able to be part of this exhibition and to be able to share Martin’s work for others to enjoy.

I would like to thank the many colleagues that have been helpful in presenting this exhibition: Martin Azevedo for the chance to exhibit his wonderful work, David Olivant for his insightful writing, the Stanislaus State School of the Arts for the catalog design, and Claremont Print and Copy for the printing of this catalog.

Much appreciation is also extended to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker, Director, Art Space on Main California State University, Stanislaus

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MARTIN AZEVEDO BIO Martin Azevedo’s prints/drawings explore ideas of symbolism, archetypes, masculinity, power, narrative, and allegory. Martin was born and raised in Hanford, California. His interest in art and printmaking began at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, CA upon taking a lithography course. He then moved on to receive his BA in Art from California State University, Chico in 2009, and completed his MFA at The Ohio State University in 2011. He currently teaches and continues his studio work at California State University, Stanislaus in Turlock, CA.

ARTIST STATEMENT The body of work completed for this exhibition marks a shift in my artistic practice. Printmaking has always been an essential part of my process and the majority of my work typically relies heavily upon the multiple and the handprinted image. However, for this exhibition I have turned my efforts towards photography, video, and sculpture.

My imagery makes use of symbolism and ideas of archetypes as a way to understand the world around me. I am interested in the simplicity of an image and its ability to convey the same or different idea or meaning to a group or individual. I am interested in what happens when these symbols interact on the same plane and the conversation that occurs between many or few pieces layered together in one visual plane.

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Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?*

by David Olivant The recent photographic and video works of Martin Azevedo mark an abrupt departure from the manners, if not from the morals, of his practice as a draftsman printmaker.The lithographs, silkscreens, woodcuts and drawings display nightmarish dystopian combat scenarios in a poster-like format with frequent quasi-comic book predellas. We feel that the accomplished draftsmanship and bristling imaginative flamboyance yield a plethora of information that we can’t quite process, unsure whether it is meant for us in particular or some other, possibly younger or sharper age group. Should we take these images seriously as indicative of a shrewdly conceived zeitgeist or are they intended more flippantly? The morbid, almost clinical fascination with and anatomizing of disease, violence and entropy are couched in terms that alarm and desensitize at the same time.

The references and format of these graphic works are definitely, for the most part, fashionably outside of main—or museum—stream art. While they could comfortably be subsumed under a William Wiley influence, the prints also have close affinities to Azevedo’s near contemporary, Andrew Schoultz. Perhaps more telling, in the drawings particularly, is the debt to Terry Gilliam, whose technically archaic, hand-done graphic style, in the way it is appropriated by Azevedo, suggests a sense of obsolescence as well as the over-riding feeling that there might be some merit in the things we believed we had cast off or outgrown.The references to styles associated with particular periods and movements (Dada, steam punk, Monty Python, funk, beat) and the interplay between modern and traditional war-making as well as art-making technologies suggests that some of the tension implicit in these images is due to a sense of simmering and unresolved inter-generational conflict. In this sense, the artist’s work overlaps with some of the issues explored in the work of contemporary Japanese artists like Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami.

I wonder, then, if the abrupt change of medium and imagery adopted

by Azevedo marks for him a tentative, reluctant crossing to an older, riper generational identity, not least because the references are now more emphatically highbrow albeit without abandoning his grounding 6

in street vernacular. The juxtaposition of casually opened porno magazines, TV remotes and laptops with the standard paraphernalia of the seventeenth century still life seems to suggest an attempt to paper over the cracks of a generational divide or a coming of age on the part of the artist. Despite the unlikely choice of medium and genre the Ecce Homo group might be read as a rite of passage, both on the part of the artist and of his age group and, by extension, of society.

Part of this might have to do also with the fact that Azevedo has now returned (perhaps reluctantly) to the narrowed sphere of his old valley stomping grounds where his cultural persona is likely to be measured against standards he assumed were outgrown, outworn and outmoded.

It is intriguing to me that in conversations Martin reflects often on his relationship with an aging, now local grandparent, who is struggling to maintain independence while fighting the monster of senile cognitive decline. It might then be significant that the impetus for the Ecce Homo group and the setting for three of the images is a return to the house of the same grandparent. It could be pushing the connection too far to suggest a quasi-identification with this octogenarian progenitor, who can symbolize both the decay of the past and a dread of the future.The irony of the old man’s position is that as the past, no matter how tainted or unpleasant, gets further distant it becomes increasingly the anchor for memories and personality, while the future, increasingly imminent, seems to promise only a decay normally associated with the past. Thus the rite of passage is complicated by this disturbing overlay of temporal confusion and reevaluation.

Martin (faceless in all of the photographs) perhaps stands in for his grandpa who he has re-imagined as a putative creator god enacting some thinly disguised references to Michelangelo’s ceiling. This wannabe deity’s attempts at cosmogenesis are seriously impeded by his conflation with Caravaggio’s terminally pubescent, narcissistic Uffizzi Bacchus who exudes, positively reeks of, decadence and decay.

In the first photo of the Ecce Homo group the “Adam” figure, supposedly created ex nihilo, reminds us of his recumbent but fully clothed descendant in Dejeuner sur L’Herbe Adam cradles a further attempted creation on the screen of his lap-placed lap-top where the coital figures mirror his pose. From the confusion of the four legs of the male and female coital couple a potential hermaphrodite figure seems to be emerging from this sordid union.That is, until closer inspection, we fail to notice the coition and instead see a large-legged female who unwittingly apes Adam’s pose in the Sistine ceiling. In this photograph the fall of man is pre-figured in his apparent creation. The cut flowers, whose scale and centrality render them the ostensible subject of this image, function like an expanded, but nonetheless, failed fig-leaf.

In the second photo, the god figure is more obviously a hedonist and seems to have a sense of humor in that his gesture of gratitude and supplication, with undertones of disingenuousness, also functions to op7

erate the laden ice-cream spoon—and he eats directly from the tub—manners please! He also likes wine and cigars and, of course, porno magazines! It seems superfluous to spell out the implied analogies between the close-ups of breasts and genitalia and the plates of fruit. The central protagonist has sunk lower into the picture (both physically and morally) perhaps in deference to the commanding bison head trophy that stares down from the wall, a possible candidate for a more “primitive” or atavistic notion of god.

Ditto in many ways for number three in the group, which deploys the same bowl of beetle-invested fruit, the cigar and the same vase of flowers all in their approximately familiar positions from number two.

EH Four gives us a much colder palette and reminders of Vermeer’s Milkmaid. The flowers have been exchanged for much more withered specimens and the vase is now flanked by identical patterned cups. The limp wrist action, pulled again from Mannerist conventions, suggests at once the spout of the vase/milk-pitcher (now implicitly empty) and a flaccid phallus.This is augmented by the addition of some Thiebaudesque cakes and a color-coordinated dead scrub jay. The addition of the latter and the section of vertebrae near the vases points up the momento mori theme, which in some ways is brought to its conclusion in this panel.

The fifth photograph, produced separately from the first four, recapitulates the main themes with a noticeable curtailment of mercurial antics by the straightjacket of geometrical precision. All of the dominant objects directly face front so that the principal compositional vectors are perpendicular or parallel to the edges of the format. The human figure is seated at an exact side profile and the crook of his left elbow forms the right-angled corner between mirror and credenza.This formality is enhanced by the symmetry of flower vases and lit candles.The selection of objects such as the subtly embossed wallpaper, florid gilt mirror frame and stylish ‘50s credenza, echoes this more mature, more settled organization.

As hinted earlier, it is the etiquette of these images, the dance between different generational and cultural norms and practices, that rewards further reflection. Their skittishness might suggest indecision about what directions personal growth could take. Much of the pathos derives from ways in which the cultural and the personal flirt with each other without ever completely embracing.

The psychic tension hinges on the degree of perceived artifice in any image. Still life is arguably the most staged, artificial and convention-laden of all genres and historically its leading exponents have chosen either to exploit or to subvert this.

Velasquez, in his early works seeking to normalize or naturalize the genre, tended to embed the still-life objects within a kitchen routine, as did Vermeer to a lesser extent in the Milkmaid. The opposite approach is to allegorize the assembled groupings into vanitas themes, reflections on the futility of life and earthly pursuits.

Azevedo’s practice has subsumed this history but also subverted key aspects of it so that, in addition to effectively deconstructing still-life conventions, he seems to sound their death-knell, to suggest that in evoking decay and mortality the entire genre is liable to self-destruct. His arrangement of objects is at once causal and deliberate but in part, owing to the momentary, glimpse-like quality inherent to the photographic medium, the ephemeral nature of existence becomes more literal than it might in a painting. Not only that, but we appear to have gate-crashed the latter stages of a party for one, an 8

orgy of abortive but desultory self-gratification. It seems we have caught the artist in flagrante delicto simultaneously placing the objects, creating the photograph, and being its central protagonist.

The manipulation of convention and artifice serves other less recursive purposes also. Otherwise the photos would rapidly become swallowed up in a type of endgame, which would only threaten to take the artist and ourselves down with them, ultimately rendering them futile through being at total odds with themselves! Show us these other purposes I hear you cry, implore…

The printed wallpaper is possibly the most significant element in a complex representational lexicon. This wallpaper comes with its own graphic style suggestive of the period in which it was produced and thus stands for or indicates that era (1940s).

Furthermore, the motifs repeated across its surface, in one case still life objects, in another classical ruins and landscape elements, stand as pointers to cultural traditions or rather as surrogates for them. The imagery, at least of the more classical motifs, suggests a largely feigned familiarity and sense of comfort with a tradition, a subtler version of the faked façade of book spines on a shelf to denote erudition. The presence of this wallpaper in the photograph brings up notions of taste which prevail in other areas as well, most noticeable in the deliberate use of pornographic imagery and objects like laptops not normally employed in still-lives, or the mounting on the wallpaper of the decapitated stuffed heads of large ruminants.

Related to the representational codes of the wallpaper, we notice photographic depictions on the screens of laptops and in glossy magazines, and further printed imagery on ceramic surfaces. The table top in each of the first four photographs also acts as a stand-in for the picture plane, and can be considered as a form of meta-representation in this sense, with its inclined wooden surface interrupted by scattered objects and debris, behaving like the brush marks in a painting, the disparate traces of the artist’s process. The shadows in number five create yet another category of mimesis. The taxidermy trophies in two and three suggest additional levels of depiction at once more real and less real than everything else. The thing here depicted, the animal, is represented in some way by its own skin and horns, but almost because of this appears more artificial. Unlike a convincing sculpted head of the same animal we can never take it on its own terms. It lacks the animation, or any suggestion of this that defined the live version, and even to some extent the corpse of the bison. Now it is rendered as both trophy and furniture or rather an image of these things. It struggles, now that it is brought back to the light of day, to the gaze of the public, to fulfill the symbolic role for which it seems to be slated, a role which can hardly ignore the drama of its decapitation. In this sense all of the images seem to struggle with the allegorical burdens placed upon them by this context and it is ultimately their failure to perform these that gives the work another significant layer of pathos.

This struggle between signifiers and signified is magnified with the insertion of the human figure -- a figure likely to appear over-burdened with signifying potential on account of its near ubiquitous deployment in traditional art. The manner in which the figure is inserted—and we really feel it as an insertion—ends the photos a whimsical quality (touches of Gilliam again) at odds with their dominant minor key, but may be the last glimpse of a prankishness we can associate with the youth of the artist. Posing as god, the artist also plays an endearing but disconcerting game of hide-and-seek. While this game consistently conceals the figure’s identity, it also plays on the notion that true artistic and cosmic creation is ultimately a dialectic between revelation and concealment.

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It is more than chance that in all five images the vase of flowers conceals the artist’s face, and we are made hyper-aware through this of the degree of contrivance in these pieces, which again is part of their manner or etiquette. The whimsicality is heightened when we compare the degree of contrivance taken to disguise a face with the freedom, almost encouragement we are afforded to examine the images in the porno magazines, which now function as debased surrogates for the otherwise fragmented human figure. There is also something vaguely anarchic, almost deliberately juvenile, about the abandon with which unconventional objects are thrown into the mix. The more we conjecture upon the possible meanings and metaphors of this photographic suite the more complex and contradictory they appear, flattering only to deceive.

It is worth noting that these photographs invite sustained meditation on the bankruptcy of current and even historical tropes of masculinity. The obstacles and the aids to growth, while typically conflated, are also exclusively patriarchal.

Femininity is rarely involved in the dynamic except in its most degraded forms, which serve as a comment on the moral and psychic decay of what have served as male ideals but now seem fragile and inadequate.Through a lot of disingenuous self-exploration, Azevedo has brought this conflict, which might be typified and concentrated by the stage of development in which he finds himself, to a refined level of expression. I find he is unflinching in his search for meaning and his avoidance of outmoded paradigms or glib solutions.

The fifth photo of the group reads as a coda to everything else, with its already noted search for a measure of decorum and geometrical eloquence. The act of creation, here effected by a play of shadows on the wall is both more trivial and more significant than in the four other photos in the group; trivial because the act of projecting shadows on a wall with one’s hand is generally associated with a child’s game, significant because in classical thought—think Plato’s cave—the “shadows on a wall” is one of the prime metaphors for our epistemological dilemmas. Which leaves the mongoose/cobra partnership at center-stage as yet un-deciphered…

A few guesses: there is a sense of ritual as the duo are flanked by the lit candles and the left hand of the seated man seems to be attempting an animation of these once living creatures, an animation which is also clearly onanistic given the proximity of his fingers to the aroused, hooded cobra head. The serpent’s phallic dance is a contrasting counterpart to the flaccid hand/spout of the surrogate milk-jug in EH 3. How long it might be sustained with the snarling, castrative presence of his archenemy around whom he struggles to coil his tail is the viewer’s guess.

* from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S.Eliot

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PRINTS

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The Fall, relief/silkscreen/mixed media, 100” x 90”, 2014 12

The Enemy is Everywhere, relief/silkscreen, 26” x 19”, 2015 13

Step the Ocean, 26” x 19”, 2015 14

IMAGES

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Ecce Homo I, digital archival print, 33� x 22�, 2016 16

Ecce Homo II, digital archival print, 33� x 22�, 2016 17

Ecce Homo III, digital archival print, 33” x 22”, 2016 18

Ecce Homo IV, digital archival print, 33� x 22�, 2016 19

Ecce Homo V, digital archival print, 33� x 22�, 2016 20

The Innumerable Gestures of Men I, video still, 2016 21

The Innumerable Gestures of Men I, video still, 2016 22

The Innumerable Gestures of Men II, video still, 2016 23

The Innumerable Gestures of Men II, video still, 2016 24

Where the wolf roams, the plow shall glisten, mixed media, 46” x 80”, 2016 25

“If I have to die, you will have to die,” detail, wood, stone, thread, feathers, 9’x9’x9’, 2016 26

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MARTIN AZEVEDO EDUCATION 2012

MFA in Printmaking, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

2009

B.A. Art/ Minor Art History California State University, Chico, CA

2006

General Education course work, College Of The Sequoias, Visalia, CA

2004

Associates of Arts, Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2016

If Destruction be Our Lot, Art Space on Main, Turlock, CA

2015

We Will Live Forever, C.O.S. Art Gallery, Visalia, CA

2014

Our Lot, Spire, Mobile, AL

2014

Building Steam, Merced Art Gallery, Merced, CA

2013

100 Dialects, Roy G Biv Gallery, Columbus, OH

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2016

Pacific States Biennial National Exhibition, University of Hawaii, Hilo, HI

2016

Stand Out Print, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN

2016

Secrets, The Ohio State University Faculty Club, Columbus, OH

2016

Invitational Printmaking Exhibition, Sagebrush Art Gallery, Sheridan, WY

2016

Night Moves, The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel, Portland, OR

2015

Atlanta Print Biennia, Kai Lin Art, Atlanta, GA

2015

Press & Pull, The Center for Visual Arts, Greensboro, NC

2015

Printmaking Now, IMAGO Gallery, Warren, RI

2015

4 x 6 24 Chambers: Contextual Language, Corridor 2122, Fresno, CA

2015

La Arrache 4, Les Abattoirs, Riom, France

2014

Impressed, Tacocat, Columbus, OH

2014

Conduit, Lake Region Arts Council, Fergus Falls, MN

2014

Mash Up: Collages in Mixed Media, Islip Art Museum, Islip, NY

2014

Pressure, LeSo Gallery, Toledo, OH

2014

Impact-Influence, Carnegie Gallery at Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH

2013

La Calaca Press 2013, Museo De la Ciudad, Cuernavaca, Mexico

2013

Big Ten Prints, Lawrence Art Center, Lawrence, KS

2013

Printmakers International, Art Center of Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX

2012

Department of Art: Visiting Artists and Lecturers, Swing Space Gallery, Columbus, OH

2012

Calacas, II La Calca Press International Print Exchange, Expression Graphics, Oak Park, IL, Corpus Christi TX,

Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Michoacรกn, Mexico, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

2012

20/20 Vision 5th Edition, The Art of Contemporary University, The Fire House Gallery, Louisville, GA (Catalogue)

2012

Next Wave Part II Masters of Fine Arts Thesis Show, OSU Urban Arts Space, Columbus, OH (Catalogue)

2012

Southern Graphics Conference Professional Portfolio Exhibition, The Big Ten Print Exchange, New Orleans, LA

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2011

Kingsville Inksville, The University Of Texas Kingsville, Kingsville, TX

2011

American Youth Printmaking, Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai, China (Catalogue)

2011

Printed Matters, Shot Tower Gallery, Columbus, OH

2011

Impossible Things, The Ohio Art League, Columbus, OH

2011

New Prints 2011/ Summer, The International Print Center, New York, NY Juror: Trenton Doyle Hancock

2011

Recent Arrivals, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 2010 Last Gasp In Hasket Hall, The Ohio State University,

Columbus, Oh

2008

Chico State Annual Juried Student Print Exhibition, Chico, CA Juror: Yuji Hiratsuka

2008

Eibon II Print Exchange, Exhibition Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MI

2007

Chico State Annual Juried Student Print Exhibition, Chico, CA Juror: Kurt Kemp

PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIOS 2014

Law and Order, Participant, curated by Richard Peterson

2013

Frogman’s Print and Paper Workshop Portfolio, Participant, curated by Jeremy Manard

2013

Secrets, Participant, curated by Sophie Knee

2013

Lithoholics-Non Anonymous, Participant, curated by Richard Peterson

2013

Transmogrify, Participant, curated by Jack Arthur Wood Jr

2012

La Calacas Print Exchange II, Participant, curated by Carlos Barberena

2012

Part and Departure, Organizer/Participant

2011

Mini Print Portfolio and Exchange, Participant, curated by Chico State Print Club

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2011

Best In Show ‘The Atomic Explosion’ at Peter Blum, Plus “New Prints 2011/ Summer” at the International Print Center.

The Village Voice, June 2011

AWARDS: 2013

Greater Columbus Arts Council Professional Development Grant

2012

Fergus Family Scholarship for Thesis Research

2011

Charles Massey Jr Printmaking Scholarship

2008

Janet Turner Printmaking Scholarship

PERMANENT COLLECTIONS Southern Graphics Council Print Archives Collection Janet Turner Print Museum, Chico CA Meriam Library Special Collections, Chico CA

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AC K NOW LE D GE M E N TS California State University, Stanislaus

Dr. Ellen Junn, President

Dr. James T. Strong, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Ar ts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Depar tment of Ar t

Dr. Roxanne Robbin, Chair, Professor

Dean De Cocker, Professor

Jessica Gomula, Associate Professor

David Olivant, Professor

Gordon Senior, Professor

Richard Savini, Professor

Mar tin Azevedo, Assistant Professor

Daniel Edwards, Assistant Professor

Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Assistant Professor

Meg Broderick, Administrative Suppor t Assistant II

Andrew Cain, Instructional Technician I

Jon Kithcar t, Equipment Technician II

Ar t Space on Main

Dean De Cocker, Director

Nikki Boudreau, Gallery Assistant

Special Thanks

California State University, Stanislaus, Ar t Depar tment faculty and staff, Ar t Space gallery assistants,

Bradley Peatross, and The Jentel Ar tist Residency Program for a dedicated time to think about and begin

production on this body of work.

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