Travelers

P·P·O·W is pleased to announce its fifth exhibition featuring the collaborative work of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz.
In their most recent series entitled Travelers, Martin and Muñoz subvert the cheerful conventions of the snow globe with dark ruminations. The typical snow globe winter wonderlands are supplanted by desolate and sometimes sinister snowscapes. Forests of dead trees traversed
by solitary figures laden with suitcases. The characters seem dressed for a more civilized sort of commute, their business
attire ill-suited for wading through deep snow and biting cold. They are collectively caught off guard by some series of events
and forced from their familiar habitat into a harsh and premature exile. Ultimately it isleft to the viewer to speculate
about the possible narratives. These scenes encased in glass and water each represent an attempt to encapsulate, isolate, and
illuminate a form of human dread associated with the unexpected and the obvious but often ignored inevitabilities
of mortality. In a sense the figures in the snow globes become stand-ins for us.
Their nomadic isolation a metaphor for our own sense of unknown origins and destinations.
Martin and Muñoz will also present a series of large scale photographs derived from the snow globes. These scenes, elevated in scale, alter the
intimacy of the snow globe sculptures and depict these dioramas asif occurring during day or night. Light boxes of
these works are currently on view at Grand Central Station in New York City through 2003. They will also be showing
work in a group exhibition curated by the Public Art Fund at City Hall Park through June 2003.
The artists will also be exhibiting in solo showsin 2003 at Galeria Moriarty and the Museo de la Universidad de Alicante in Spain.