Edgar Martins: A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings and Dwarf Exoplanets

About

HotShoe Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of new works by Portugese artist Edgar Martins. Based in London, Martins is one of the foremost art photographers working in the UK today; having accumulated a salubrious combination of respect, admiration and controversy over the past few years. Conscious of its history, Edgar Martins' work concerns the formal elements and potentials of photography and its processes. With bodies of work that constantly and engagingly challenge the nature of photography as art, the built environment, and the wider issues of image-making, Edgar Martins contributes to a discourse that seeks to both establish and question the role of art photography in the wider context of contemporary art. This exhibition will present two new series of works. A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings is structured into an urban topographic survey; the series exposes the difficult relationship between modernist architecture and commercial and residential development whilst summoning a disquieting conjunction of reality, hyper-reality, fantasy and fiction. The second series of works, Dwarf Exoplanets & Other Sophisms, begins by asking the following philosophical questions: What is the character and general structure of the Universe in which we live? Is there a permanent element in the constitution of the universe? How are we related to it? What place do we occupy in it, and what is the kind of conduct that befits the place we occupy? Space has been a major concern in art throughout recorded history and, when considering all fields of endeavor, these concerns are multiplied due to the number of ways in which we can define space. Mathematical space, for example, takes the form of a noun. It might be conceived as a set of elements or points, satisfying specific geometric structures. Topologically, space might be defined as the infinite extension of the three-dimensional field in which all matter exists. As a verb, however, ‘to space out' implies a process of organising or arranging. In this sense, Dwarf Exoplanets & Other Sophisms seeks to create a set of references between reality and its image, considering the possibility of both its organisation and its constitution. Curated by Daniel Campbell Blight