Martyn Strange: New American Pop

November 5-23, 2021
Martyn Strange: New American Pop
Opening reception: Friday, November 5, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday 9 AM – 5 PM and Saturday 10 AM – 1 PM. Closed Wednesday-Saturday, November 24-27.

Martyn Strange (b. 1992) is a multimedia artist, musician, and writer who works primarily in painting, drawing, and prose writing. He has self-produced three albums of music under various monikers and has performed with numerous bands all over the U.S. He has also self-published three volumes of poetry as well as an illustrated zine, and has written several treatments and scripts for film and television. His first show of paintings opened at Bloom in Bristol, TN in May 2021.

My work examines the expanding relationships among celebrity, technology, social media, and advertising. It explores how certain images, phrases, colors, and ideas stay in our minds, often on a loop. Aesthetically, this is achieved through a pop art lens, in a style I have self-dubbed “New American Pop”, which reflects the flat, plastic sea of content that surrounds us day to day and embeds itself in our consciousness via social media and the internet. The images are replicated from print ads, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google searches. The phrases paired with them come from a variety of places: song lyrics, overheard conversation, commonly repeated sayings, or internet slang. The words are meant to represent the dissonance in the messaging of advertising and its repetitive nature, as well as impose new meanings on the images. My work is very much informed by the history of pop art and references the likes of Warhol, Ruscha, and Rauschenberg. I use primarily acrylics and gouache on primed wooden panels.

Instagram: iammartynstrange