In his landscape series entitled Idyll, Martin Cox subverts a sense of immediacy. The viewer is separated in time from the eerie elegant black-and-white images of Cox's native South Wales and England, and this seems to be the point. The roads abandoned farmhouses and waterways of Idyll, familiar to the artist since childhood, seem just beyond reach. Though the images are contemporary, they peek out at us from an alternate universe, as if we have tumbled into a scene someone else suppressed from memory. Cox's photographs, in rich tones of black and gray, often describe moments that are neither day nor night and though there are no people visible, a human drama seems to have just occurred or is about to take place.

Cox has long explored themes of isolation, largely in the ruins of remote communities. Early photographic journeys took him to the abandon mining villages of South Wales and the ruins on the edge of the Salton Sea in the California desert. Cox's mining town, desert and maritime pictures are crisp, often stark, with dynamic geometries. In Idyll, the images are softer in focus, subtly distorted, curving away from us: overlapping masses of dark and shadow have no discernible edges.

In Idyll, Cox uses a a gentle distortion - an effect much like a pinhole camera. Cox chose the Diana camera for his series in part, because he found its selective focus appropriate for the profusion of detail in the lush British countryside: A sharper focus would provide too much information, competing with the larger picture.

In the photograph titled "Allbrook Lock" we see water cascading over steps from a canal lock, long out of use. The viewer looks up the stairs, which narrow to a vanishing point that disappears in darkness, a place we can never get to though we are aimed in its direction. The momentum should be upward, but the water is tumbling down toward us, pushing us back. On the stairs there is white water. Light that shines onto the widest step, where all is urgency and confusion, also illuminates the low hanging leaves of a tree. The reflected light on the foliage looks like water, and it, too, seems wild and fast-moving. The periphery of the image is black unapproachable, committing us to the push and pull of the drama before us.

In "Little Pool Hall" an abandoned 15th century farmhouse inhabits a bizarre twilight. Outside of the stone house the sky is gray the hour uncertain. But the windows are black; inside it is night time. The slightly distorted shapes of fence posts, a moss covered stone wall and clumps of weeds and long grass all suggest continual movement, even as it seems no one has laid eyes on this place in a very long time. Cox currently resides in Echo Park he holds a degree in fine arts from the Exeter College of Art (UK) and also attended the Winchester School of Art (also UK). His work has been exhibited in New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities.

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