San Diego Union-Tribune
November 13, 2005

ARTIST MAY-LING MARTINEZ WORKS DANCE THE LINE BETWEEN FANTASY AND REALITY

A 'natural inclination' was her starting point

by Robert L. Pincus
ART CRITIC

May-Ling Martinez's chosen images recall a decade still famous for it's devotion to suburban life, the corporate man, and Dick and Jane reading primers. You might think an artist who conjures up the 1950's would be a boomer herself. Not so.

She was born in the 1970's (Martinez is 32). She presented her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, "Inner Immensity", in October 2004 and is currently completing an essay about her show to finish the degree from San Diego State University.

This sort of retro imagery often suggests stories to her that take the form of arresting collages, like "the Function of a Doll" in which a man and girl, presumably father and daughter, are fussing over a doll in a high chair. This image has disquieting elements, too; machines have attached themselves to both people-or vice versa.

They're half-told stories, and I hope they open others to their own stories," says Martinez.

  


May-Ling Martinez came to
San Diego from Puerto Rico
nearly a decade ago.
Dan Trevan/Union-Tribune


This particular half-told tale was in an exhibition called "GRRRRRL POWER" held in May at the Art of Framing Gallery in University Heights. Though she still has one foot in the grad-student realm, the other is firmly in the world. In April, some of her collages, as well as an elaborate sculptural installation, were on view in the 2005 Juried Biennial exhibition at Carlsbad's Cannon Gallery. Hugh Davies, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, was the juror.

Her strong connection to the imagery of a decade is rooted in memory and family. I'ts a way of connecting with her parents and grandparents, and with the iconography of the American dream.

 

Without the North American Free Trade Agreement, she might have fulfilled her ambition to be an artist somewhere other than Southern California. Her father, an engineer by trade in San Juan, worked for a company that decided it wanted to have a facility just south of the border after the passage of NAFTA in 1993.
Given that he was a trusted employee who was also a Spanish speaker, he became the perfect candidate for a post here.

Martinez stayed behind to finish a bachelor's degree in Art at Sacred Heart University in San Juan in 1996 and then joined her parents and siblings in Chula Vista. She began taking classes at Southwestern College. In 2001, she was accepted into the MFA program at SDSU.
On the walls of her studio at SDSU are new collages in a 1950's mode.

That "dream", Martinez explains, was influential in her native Puerto Rico as in the continental United States.

"Part of me relates to the ideal that if you just work hard you'll be better off. But there are parts of that idea that seem so elusive.

"There's a disruption between fantasy and reality. In some way I'm trying to explain that through my art."

Martinez is the first artist in her family. "We didn't go to museums or anything like that. I didn't have private art lessons. But I did have a natural inclination to say something."

  

"I spend a lot of time at thrift shops and swap meets" she says. "I'm trying to make sure everything is from the same era. That's very important to me."

Moving to San Diego has had a large impact on her art. "I didn't think it was an influence on my work at first, these thoughts about American culture. In a sense, you already feel part of it in Puerto Rico. But in thinking about that American ideal, I have felt as if I was inside and outside of it."

She is just as fascinated with the way objects trigger memories and associations. The constructions in her sculptural installations --shown at both SDSU and the Cannon Gallery -- conjure up cryptic storage jars and fragments of human figures. Like her collages, they seem to exist in some region between everyday reality and fantasy or dreams.