(2008)
a photographic installation by Dimitrije Martinovic

In Dimitrije Martinovic's new body of photographs (2008) we are introduced to characters who must all be the cast of a new contemporary opera in four acts. Certain similarities are apparent and if you look long enough you will hear the Rock & Roll, Blues, Klezmer, and Headbanger music quietly woven into the libretto hanging in the air just in front of the backdrops. These images take the viewer that far into their imaginations as to hear the musical score. Why do these people all live on a plateau of their very own? On one in which the meaning of; larger than life repeats loudly and irrationally towards gothic surreality. Surely merry pranksters all or rather are we truly witnessing mere moments before tragedy takes place? Welcome to a world at the end.

The Girl with the White Head Band.
37" x 40", $780.00 each print.

In: The Girl with the White Head Band, the white chick on a nasty delicious high beckons you into her world of refracted reality, beautiful to look at, delightful to hold but if you break it, it is sold. To the Devil.

The Golden Defender. 37" x 40", $780.00 each print

Just trying to view the remains of your beloved? Sorry the mortuary is closed. and someone shrank all of what we knew as culture, or so it seems in; the Golden Defender.
Stylistically creepy in every modern way.

VIGILANTE. 35" x 40", $780.00 each print

In her famous SCUM manifesto a ranting Solanas (1) called for destruction of men and men-loving women, to liberate all women. In the image; Vigilante we may be viewing a Solanas acolyte in the midst of her practice. There is no shame on Her great black beauty with admittedly certain vicarious impulses being satisfied on the viewers end in remembering a favourite communist slogan: "The last capitalist will be hung by the guts of the last bureaucrat", like that but feminist, lovely. All's fair in love and war, never more clear in this total collapse of moral ethics as this gentleman finds himself in mortal danger and in a state of complete humiliation. Little in this world could be as bad. Martinovic could well use the alternative title; The Great Mother Takes Her Revenge.

The Klezmer band stops playing just moments after the image of; Universales and all Hell breaks loose at the wedding reception when Slyvia's mother is introduced to Katherine, the WASP butch girfriend of her rabinal student daughter. We witness their content communication as they exchange 10 different universally accepted hand signs like; Whad up? and Surf's up! Sacred gathering places where human rituals occur are also likely places for bleeps in the universe, outrageous events only too familiar within our own family histories.

UNIVERSALES. five panels 35" x 40", $780.00 each print
click here to view the rest of UNIVERSALES

Martinovic paints possibilities with a deft stroke, tongue in cheek. Or is his tongue directed more toward us in our humanity. Are these symbolic narratives allegories of our contemporary worlds, living out our own dualistic lives positioned on our own individual precipice? But what if, "God were one of us? Just a stranger on a bus?" (2) As in the colours of the spectrum coming full circle when red meets blue, to be able to laugh at ourselves with one another is truly our divine gift.
—Susan Mackay

(1) Valerie Jean Solanas 1988 was an American radical feminist writer best known for shooting the artist Andy Warhol in 1968. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto, a Valerie Solanas author/publisher SCUM manifesto

(2) Joan Elizabeth Osborne (born July 8, 1962) American singer-songwriter. Her song One of Us 1995 brought her notoriety

more work by Dimitrije Martinovic:
APATHOT
and
The Exquisite Folly of the Event and its Participants