Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce, The report of my death is an exaggeration; Memoirs: Of Becoming Narrenschiff, Daniel Joseph Martinez’ second solo exhibition with the gallery; featuring a new body of work investigating Michel Foucault’s notions of narrenschiff, and contemporary contiguities.

For the exhibition, Martinez will present a series of four narratives throughout both exhibition spaces of the gallery: provocative text paintings, documentary photographs, Polaroids and small sculptures based on an immersive interactive practice, spanning over three years, of overlaying Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) onto the urban space of Los Angeles. Martinez translated the LA Metro system as a modern day space of narrenschiff. During this time, once a week Martinez would ride the bus endlessly around Los Angeles, from morning till night, until he could ride no more. In the spirit of artists such as Vito Acconci and Sophie Calle, Martinez would listen, watch and follow the fellow passengers traveling all over the city. Inspired but what he saw, heard and imagined on these journeys, Martinez created the text based paintings in the exhibition. Influenced by the discrepancies of local colorful hand made signs, Martinez utilizes this technique as a platform for energetic poignancy. The poetic paintings situate themselves as simultaneously condemned and benign; criminal yet just; implausible, but certain; engrossing and rigorous. Martinez pushes the articulacy of lunacy, sickness, and criminality, instigating a war with the world and oneself.

With a long history of subverting visual culture and language; Martinez’s newest body of work cedes a fresh stance in his unwavering commitment to finding reason in madness.

A portfolio of twelve documentary photographic prints will be on view in the Roberts & Tilton Project Room. Entitled Field notes from South Los Angeles; this world is a fleshless one where madness, love and heretics are all I know, the print portfolio has been published in collaboration with Chair & Associate Professor Arnold Kemp and Associate Professor and master printer Holly Morrison of the Virginia Commonwealth University Painting + Printing (PAPR) Department.

To accompany the exhibition, Roberts & Tilton will publish a catalogue for The report of my death is an exaggeration; Memoirs: Of Becoming Narrenschiff with an essay by Juli Carson, PhD, Professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art at UCIrvine and designed by Tracey Schiffman of Shiffman & Kohnke.

Daniel Joseph Martinez’ recent exhibitions include The Past Is Present, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI; In the Good Name of the Company, For Your Art, Los Angeles, CA; NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, The New Museum, New York, NY; No Way of Life is Inevitable, FLORA ars+natura, Bogota, Columbia; The Symbolic Landscape: Pictures Beyond the Picturesque, University Art Galleries, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA; Print/Out at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; I want to go to Detroit; Cheerleaders CHEER, LAXART, Los Angeles, a solo exhibition in conjunction with Pacific Standard Time; Divine Violence Installation, Site Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe; The Artist’s Museum: Los Angeles Artists, 1980-2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love; or, Where You Goin' with That Gun in Your Hand: Bobby Seale And Huey Newton Discuss the Relationships between Expressionism and Social Reality Present in Hitler's Paintings, Istanbul Biennial, Turkey. Martinez was included in the Aperto exhibition at the 1993 Venice Biennale and two Whitney Biennials in 2008 and 1993 where the artist’s Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture); or Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members) stated I Can't/Imagine/Ever Wanting/To Be/White, which were subsequently featured on the cover of Artforum magazine on two separate occasions; once as the cover for the 1993 Whitney Biennial edition and once as the cover for Best of the 90s December 1999 edition. Martinez’ work has been the subject of four monographs to date, including the monumental retrospective monograph published by Hatje Cantz in 2009. Martinez represented the United States in the American pavilion in the 2006 Cairo Biennial, and was included in the 2007 Moscow Biennial, and the 2010 La Biennale de Quebec, Quebec City, Canada. His work can be found in numerous public collections both in the United States and abroad including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, FL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Linda Pace Foundation, San Antonio, TX. In 2014 Martinez is scheduled for a project with MoMA, New York and will also be included in the Site Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe, NM. Martinez currently lives and works in Los Angeles where he is Professor of Theory, Practice, and Mediation of Contemporary Art at the University of California, Irvine; he teaches in the Graduate Studies Program and the New Genres Area.