Dani Marti, The Pleasure Chest, 2015, second hand necklaces and beads on powder coated aluminium frame, 255 x 170 x 12cm
DANI MARTI’s work is on display at UNSW Galleries in ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ - a new exhibition exploring queer kinship and forms of being together. Presented across the entire gallery and online, this major project seeks to foreground the way LGBTQI+ communities create alternative networks of support through various creative and resourceful means.
Marti is showing two works: a two channel video work, Notes for Bob (2012-14), and a woven necklace wall sculpture The Pleasure Chest (2015). These are prime examples of the seemingly stark division between Marti’s work as a painter/weaver, and a film-maker whose subjects probe the sexual lives of others.
Morgan Falconer says of Marti’s oeuvre, “Marti’s painting-objects are metaphorical, his films are allegorical: both use one thing to describe another. Beads describe their wearer; tales of sex describe a life with or without love. Marti doesn’t pretend to offer up the whole, essential individual to our gaze. Indeed, his work insists on the fact that identity is not a stable essence that can be recognised and captured again and again; instead it is something performed, and it changes each time in the performance.”
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