BIO
Paula De Martino (1997) is a Chilean artist with a BA from PUC (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile), Santiago and an MFA from Hunter College, NYC. She works and lives in Queens NYC making sculptures, paintings, video and all sort of props for performances that may or may not happen. As of now Paula’s work has to do with the condition of domesticity and control. She has had a solo show at Tutu Gallery, NYC and Centro Arte Alameda, Santiago, Chile.
I make time-based sculptures, performances, videos, and installations.
I am an exhibitionist in a constant personality crisis. I am repeatedly oversharing personal sad, or uncomfortable private things and making the banal that nobody really cares about (such as losing a cat) something monumental and concerning to everyone. Sometimes I go the opposite route, turning something that alarms and worries us all (such as global warming) into a rant against my ex.
I sometimes use alter-egos as a means to create by either inventing a character to make my work instead me and, throughout that, becoming the real piece. Somebody has to perform; it’s either me or you or both of us or the artwork. The performance will happen, is happening, or has already happened, and left a prop or crime scene behind.
I’m interested in pushing the boundaries of an acceptable context for performance. When should something be scripted, and when should it be real life? Where does the piece begin, and where does the artist end?
I employ the aesthetics of urgency and desperation, humanized machines that can’t complete their function. My work is poetic in an angsty way, coarse and melodramatic like Campy horror, a parodic aesthetic full of precarious solutions.