Martin Azevedo

As a native Californian, I am constantly aware of the dramatic changes that have occurred in the Californian climate and environment over the 40+ year span of my life. Increasingly warmer and drawn-out summers create parched landscapes acting as tinderboxes for massive wildfires have become a new normal with no positive end in sight. Rapid deforestation, the continued extraction of oil, coal, and natural gas, the burning of carbon-based fuels, and polar ice caps melting, all while the human population continues to grows contributing to a slow burn apocalypse with unimaginable consequences. 

I am also very aware of California’s position in History as part of the American West which entangles its history as part of the American frontier and notions of Manifest Destiny. I see the ideas of Manifest Destiny and man's continued manipulation of the natural environment inherently intertwined as a human way of thinking. The American West represented ideas of savagery and an untamed natural world and the push Westward represented a taming, manipulation, and controlling of that natural world and bringing civilization and culture to the West. Much of that came in the form of the destruction, of those natural environments and ways of life. 

The work for this exhibition primarily utilizes relief printmaking as the tool for production of the images. Printmaking as a medium has had a dramatic impact on the world over time. From the invention of the Guttenberg press, printmaking, made both information and image dissemination possible through affordable reproduction of information and allowed the mass communication of information to proliferate through the world through reproducible texts, images, and books. The historical importance of printmaking cannot be ignored as an art form intended to promote the discussion of ideas and bring about social change.

As a visual artist, my research is focused on image-making to understand and interpret the world around me. This body of work is a response to the impacts of the changes and shifts I see taking place in the environment and world around me and an attempt to understand man’s need for power and control over the natural world and his intentional and unintentional manipulation of landscapes and nature to his own detriment.