Martin Cox. b Southampton, England. Photographer.
The young Cox was fascinated with geography, ships, tidal areas and birds. His painting and drawing drew him to study at Winchester School of Art where he planned to pursue painting, however, photography took over as his primary means of expression and investigation. After an intensive photo/film/time-based media filled three year-degree at Exeter College of Art & Design, in Devon, he moved to North London. He set about shooting and printing black & white his photography. He co-founded "The Doctors of Art" - a performance/photo-collaboration coupled with an extremely short lived magazine - ARTBOMB - with London-artist and photographer, Mark P. Thompson.
Later, a road trip across the south western United States made an indelible impression and landscape began to emerge as a major theme in his work.
He won a Greater London Arts Council Award, resulting in a two-person photography exhibition at The London Film-makers Co-op Gallery in Camden. A year later his first solo exhibition - Clues to the City - opened at the University Art Gallery, of San Francisco - black and white photographs from the desolate valleys, abandoned in the wake of the collapsed mining industry of South Wales.
Exploring collaborative performance art, he began working with performance artists Amy Elliot and Steven Perkins presenting performances at the San Francisco Art Institute, Martin Weber Gallery and Artist's Television Access. Cox returned to London where The Doctors of Art made one final appearance at The Diorama before Cox returned to San Francisco. Cox participated in numerous performance collaborations with - Laura Brun, Jenni Currie, Scott MacLeod, Caitlin Morgan, Lise Swenson and others, at events at Media, Intersection for the Arts, SF Camerawork and ATA.
Cox exhibited photographic works at Intersection for the Arts, New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure Gallery, Sincere Technologies Gallery in San Francisco's Bay Area. Themes current in both the performance and photographic work were relationship to landscape, translation, clues to the past and urban decay. Works were presented as black & white photography, sometimes multi-image pieces, installations or landscape exhibitions.
Now living in Los Angeles, Cox worked at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and took a strong interest in forgotten areas of the Colorado desert, exhibiting new work at ADR Fine Arts, and DADA's nomadic gallery events in downtown Los Angeles. New projects on contemporary ruins and desert landscape were being developed while Cox was drawn to work on performance pieces with Paige Snell, Josie Roth and Robin Ford at LA's Barnsdale Art Park and Zero One Gallery. Photographer, Robert Flynt curated Cox's photo-installation at PS 122 in New York City in 1992. In 1994 he was working as a custom black & white printer at a specialist Hollywood lab printiny for photographers Herb Ritts, Horace Bristol, Julius Schulman, Greg Gorman and others. At this time he began an ongoing project at the Salton Sea which gripped him for over ten years. Exhibitions of his prints on this evolving body work were shown in Los Angeles and London. In 1996, artist Cynthia Minet curated his large scale installation of 150 images concerning the ruined former socialist utopian colony in Antelope Valley, north of LA, which was exhibited in Lancaster, CA.
In England and Wales, Cox embarked on a new series of images spurred by the local landscapes, and memory. These works, using 1960s toy cameras, were exhibited in the vicinity of the landscapes themselves, in Wales and Devon.
A collaborative maritime research project took him to China, Manila and Hong Kong (with journalist, Peter Knego) this, combined with his childhood interest in ships, now spilled over into his exhibitions. A further visit to the ship scrap yards of India, solidified "the vessel" as an icon in his work. Abandoned and contemporary ships populated his stark images, exhibited in Los Angeles, San Pedro and England. Curator and artist collaborator, Annie Shaw presented his maritime/seascape installation at her "LeeFahsalung" project in Chinatown, Los Angeles. In another collaboration, Cox joined other photographers in forming the Los Angeles League of Photographers, shooting together, meeting and discussing work. LALOP held group exhibitions in Los Angeles gallerys in 2004 and 2006.
In 2006, Cox exhibited six years of maritime related images in a large solo show at Silverlake's Metro Gallery, in Los Angeles, including, for the first time, large colour photographs from his investigations in the realm of vessels, the landscape of leisure and obsolete technology. Prints from this body of work were included at auctions in LA and NY to raise funds for Sara Terry's The AFTERMATH Project.
Following a landslide in 2005, Cox spend two years with out a studio which radically changed his approach to subject matter and work processes. He reopened his Castle Echo Studio - a studio-gallery and shooting space - in Echo Park, Los Anegles in mid 2007 with a renewed interest colour, the human form and in the portrait.
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