EAST BAY EXPRESS : CRITIC'S CHOICE

Best Western: Art by Martin Webb

The open road exercises the same mythic pull on the American psyche that the frontier did, so it's interesting to get an English artist's take on our dromomania, our travel bug. In his show at Esteban Sabar Gallery, Best Western(named after the motels, of course), Martin Webb records his impressions of going mobile, but in the curious medium of concrete (pigmented with acrylic), which is entirely appropriate, on second thought. He also literally impresses into the paintings the souvenirs of his journeys: keys, gears, and other industrial effluvia are buried in the liquid matrix and later sanded and buffed back to the light of day. These paintings are both maps and archaeological digs; considering the paradoxical medium, they're also delicately also poetic, with symbols for houses and trees midway between Klee pictograms and Department of Transportation signage. The silhouetted figures will remind viewers of Jasper Johns' and William Wiley's phantom self-portraits, but in such paintings as "Super 8," "Headlight," "Walgreen," "West Ridine," and "Stage Coach," Webb depicts America's automotive landscape and culture with a lyricism that we lead-footed Yanks mostly miss.

DeWitt Cheng Jan 2008

THE REAL AMERICA?

“Now, that’s interesting. That looks like some broke-ass door of some f**ked-up, burned out barn, swinging in the breeze because no-one gives a damn to fix it … now that’s the real America!”. - Very drunk guy making some sharp observations about the work at the "Best Western" show in Oakland.

OAKLAND MAGAZINE July 2008

The Oakland Period - Reused, Recycled and Found Materials Define an Art
Movement

There’s no such thing as an unfinished beer in Oakland. That old TV on the corner? Not, in fact, useless.
And that stack of old furniture on the curb could eventually end up in an art gallery. In Oakland, everything
can become art, given motivated and mused manos.
    That’s because our fair city is awash in an artistic Renaissance, one born out of the fruits of dumpsters,
and the leavings of an overproductive and undercreative society. Call it a green art movement, the very
epitome of reuse: building beauty out of other people’s trash.
    Oakland’s burgeoning reuse movement has been in full swing now for more than three years. With new
galleries sprouting up around the Art Murmur nexus at 23rd Street and Telegraph Avenue, and the galleries
of Old Oakland joining in on the first Friday fun, there are more outlets for art in this city than ever. And
that means there are more places to display the fruits of what has become known as the Oakland Reuse
Movement.
    When the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts decided to feature members of the Oakland art movement, the
gallery found itself playing host to all of the aforementioned junk and more. The gallery’s entryway was
guarded by a two-story-high city facade constructed from cardboard boxes, duct tape and spray paint. One
piece on display was simply an old television with a photo of an Oakland gutter pasted across the chipped
screen. Other works featured soda cans, bottle tops, plastic bags and all manner of equipment
normally tossed aside by our throwaway society.
    Why do artists like Ise Lyfe, Martin Webb, Christopher Weiss and Monica Reskala all use recycled and
reused materials in their work? For more reasons than can easily be named. For a start, many Oakland
artists are already a product of their environment simply by being in Oakland. Rents in San Francisco, and
elsewhere in the Bay Area, are far too high for all but the most established of artists to afford. And studio
space is even tougher to pay for, since most warehouses in San Francisco have long ago been converted
into chic lofts.
    So the artists retreated to Oakland, where empty warehouses are abundant, and rents are slightly cheaper
if you’re adventurous. But even the rents of Oakland aren’t low enough to leave room in many budgets for
the paints, canvases, kilns and other artists’ tools. That’s why so many Oakland artists are taking inspiration
from their workplace, from the street corner and from their own trashcans.
    Ise Lyfe is a native of Oakland. At 25, he’s been performing spoken word for eight years now. Only
recently, however, has he also taken up the camera. In March, Lyfe’s work was shown at the Joyce Gordon
Gallery on 14th Street in downtown Oakland. For Lyfe, it was his first art show, and for viewers, it was a
window into Africa.
    Prior to his showing, Lyfe had returned from his first trip to Africa. He spent one month in Ghana, and
he said it was a life-changing experience. 
    “As soon as I got there, what was spinning in my head was finding a way to tangibly represent my
experience there. I wanted to find a way to tangibly make a connection between the struggles we have here
in Oakland and the beauty we have here in Oakland, and connect them to the struggles and the beauty of
Africa. I wanted to do away with the negative perceptions that exist of Africa,” says Lyfe.
    With his photos complete and his poems ready, Lyfe went looking for frames at local framing shops.
“The first thing I was doing was going to Aaron Brothers and looking at frames. The frames weren’t
speaking to the photographs,” says Lyfe. “They were kind of commodifying the photos. I have a picture of
a young girl using a pile of rubble as a bathroom, and putting that in a $150 frame just didn’t fit.”
    So, Lyfe decided to use found broken window frames and panes. He placed his images in these window
frames as if they were the panes of glass. Surrounding those images with chipped wood, flakey faded paint,
and glass sometimes jagged with breaks and cracks proved to be the final touch Lyfe need to bring home
the power of his experience abroad.
    Martin Webb is also a traveler. He moved to the United States from England with the hopes of building a
successful new life. Instead, he found himself spreading concrete flooring in condos and houses. But, like
any good Oaklander (native or transplanted), Webb used his surroundings to fire art back into the forefront
of his life.
    Webb used that very same concrete flooring to cover his canvases as a base coating for some of his
paintings. Some of those canvases he augmented with slabs of wood and tiling found at his day job. The
combination of these two materials gives Webb’s work a rustic feel, as though the images and shapes he
produces were being created upon the side of a barn or the floor of an old building. Webb showed his work
at the Esteban Sabar Gallery in March. Some of the pieces included hinges, nails, tools, and even a key that
had been pressed into the concrete covering.
    Then there’s Christopher Weiss and Monica Reskala, who use salvaged wood to construct works of art
off of which you can eat. They like to find large old pieces of wood with which to work. They then finish
the wood and shape it into tables and other furniture. Weiss and Reskala work with their material, leaving
the oddities and quirks of the medium in as they shape tables with jutting chestnut knots and sweeping
curves. Weiss and Reskala are not just users of recycled materials; they let those materials’ shapes guide
the finished product’s form.
    Why so much emphasis on reuse and recycling in the Oakland art movement? Lyfe sums it up with a
connection to Africa, a continent whose people are known for reusing and recycling equipment and tools
other cultures would have long considered to be trash.
    “I think it comes out of necessity,” says Lyfe, describing the motivations behind reuse in both Oakland
and Africa. “It exists in the culture of people who live through poverty everywhere; where people are able
to take something that is trash and make it marvelous. And not only make it something that can be used, but
can be used as a piece of housing or a piece of art.” 
—By Alex Handy
—Photography by Jan Stürmann
 

Press for BEST WESTERN solo show at Estaban Sabar Gallery, Oakland, CA.

Feb 6, 2008

PIEDMONT POST

Webb’s explorations of the western landscape are as tactile as they are visual. Adding dimensionality to his work are rustic nails, rusted hinges and old fence materials. His studies of the West are accurate and true, not over glorified.

Ross Todd Kerr

January 2008

“BEST WESTERN” SHOW press release

Martin Webb’s concrete wall mounted panels convey the collaged experiences that extended journeys on America’s highways deliver to blurry travelers. Charmingly naïve impressions of roadside landmarks such as hotel signs and lone houses make the clearest impression on the mind’s eye amid the motion blur of a road trip.
Reflecting the flypaper nature of the mind, embedded keys, pipe endings, colored blocks, and suggestive words overlap painted simple outlines of figures and dwellings in Webb’s cement paintings.
Webb delivers light, simple imagery and collage to counterbalance the monumental presentations of these concrete slabs. Webb’s weightless touch with concrete simultaneously evokes lyrical children’s sidewalk chalk drawings and delicately faded prehistoric cave paintings.
A refreshingly subdued range of pigment colors showcase the concrete’s blue-grey shades, and an obvious familiarity with the medium lets Webb exploit concrete’s texture and variability of surface masterfully.
What could be construed as a novel medium, cement is dexterously embraced by Webb, who delicately records experiences in gray slab as if jotting impressions down in the most gossamer of sketchbooks. These wall hung concrete panels encapsulate the visual conflict between America’s flowing, organic nature and it’s blocky, weathered industrial landscape.
Overall, one gets from Webb’s art the impression of travel memories left behind, embedded in the very roads visited.

Esteban Sabar