Bio
Wiley Martinez is 17 years old, and attended San Antonio College through a dual credit program, graduating with a diploma from UT high school. He is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on visual art and music. He works in art and music education, teaching guitar and drum lessons while also working at SAY Si as a youth mentor, and has experience in early childhood education, having taught 1st graders to read in both English and Spanish. He likes to make work about societal alienation, existential crisis, and love. Wiley will be attending Oberlin College and plans to study English and Creative Writing. His ideal career is that of a college professor.
Artist Statement
Object permanence, to borrow a definition from Wikipedia, is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or sensed in any way. On a personal level, one can expect to gain this understanding by the time they are 8 months old, but only a few societies have ever been able to capitalize on this understanding in any real meaningful way. The Egyptians and the Mesoamericans were smart enough to spend their time making monuments to the permanence of objects, like the Great Pyramid of Cholula, so massive as to be easily mistaken as a hill, but modern cultures, while still making some buildings that are meant to last, don’t seem to be aware of the curse that object permanence harbors through the wooden horse of eternity. If you don’t quite understand what I mean, I invite you to ask yourself, if a landfill exists on a planet where no one has survived to smell it, does it stink?
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