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BIOGRAPHY

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Char Russell-Martinez is a Panamanian-American artist currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. She received her BFA in Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art, with a minor in Book Arts. She has taken part in group exhibitions at MICA, where she has been creating work that depicts her relationship to memories through an exploration in mark making. Rather than give clear visuals, she works with abstracting the images with quick gestural brushstrokes to emphasize tension and form a hazy depiction, creating a sense of ambiguity. From there, she forms an image that lies somewhere between reality and an invented environment, allowing the viewer to create their own meaning within the abstracted memories she depicts. Through her work she hopes to convey a sense of familiarity within ambiguity.

Her current body of work reflects the fleeting nature of memories and the passing of time.
For this series she pulled imagery from what is familiar. She creates work based on
certain moments, sensations, and places; focusing on the memories she find harder to
hold on to and the ones she keep coming back to in order to feel a certain way. The
concepts tend to range from romanticizing a moment in time to portraying the
uncertainty in one’s perception of self, memory, and one’s surroundings. The
paintings in this series were made with oils. Working with this medium, Martinez explored
using the mark to create a hazy image; one that leaves imagery incomplete or
blurred as if it is on the verge of being forgotten.

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