Jeffrey Martin — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Jeffrey Martín

(Interschool School: Art & Film Video MFA 25)
https://jeffreymartin.format.com/home

ONLorna Continued..., 2025

Working across film directing and visual arts, Jeffrey Martín creates installations that utilize moving image, sound composition, text, sculpture, and performance to explore collective narratives. Martín’s work often addresses the intersection of the personal and political, individual and collective, using pop culture icons as sites where private experience and public performance converge. ONLorna Continued... grids a series of six works — five paintings and one moving-image short — that abstract and remix the archives of Donna Summer and Kelly Rowland. This assemblage stages a speculative film pitch for Rowland to play Summer in her biopic: not as proxy, but as staging of two icons informing each other’s trajectories. Using collage and painting, Martín layers these two Black women who dominated their respective eras of popular music (considered within a larger matrix of mass culture and political action), into new configurations that resist linear storytelling. The LED screen displays a short film that continues this process of layered abstraction, treating archival images and video as entry points to create dimensionality, broaden perceptions, and interweave narratives. Martín creates a script for the future, a conceptual framework in which contemporary artists might channel or transform their predecessors’ legacies through reenactment and reinterpretation.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025