Orión

2015 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

Adriana Martínez

---

Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation. In the place of stars, Martínez has substituted the logos of international corporations and entities that use stars as their symbol; celestial navigation commanded by the logic of international corporations. Easily spotted is the smiling face of the Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s logo, the three-pronged Mercedes-Benz emblem, Walmart’s six-pointed asterisk, and the starry cluster of the Subaru shield.

---

Adriana Martínez is obsessed with ideas and entities that extend past national and regional borders. Martinez makes work that wrestles with the global economy through simple gestures conceived with a lightness of hand. Thought of temporally, many of her artworks can be described as quick: easily read, they come across like nimble jabs, the most succinct and articulate rebuttals. Martínez is conceptual in her approach to making art, often writing out her ideas in lieu of the traditional artist sketch. She is not concerned with the traditional skills required to realize her works—those, like the commodities she often works with, are easily traded—but is more interested in the process of imagining and articulating a certain point of view. She works with everyday and readymade objects often, pulling from the mass market and our image-rich global culture to comment on the very proliferation of those images (and the materials and peoples that they stand in for) around the world.

---

Colors:

---

• corporation.n.01
• economy.n.01
• capitalism.n.01
• criticism.n.02
• globalization.n.01
• power.n.01