April Marten, an MFA student at UT, will present a pop-up show at Gallery 1010 on Tuesday night. 

Utilizing light, installation, and performance, Marten transforms art spaces into liminal zones of meditation that confront systems of power and the cultural aura that protects them. Objects, people, and space collide, enacting energetic rituals of exchange through sensory stimulation.

Says Marten, "My current body of work is a study of the material culture of gender, artifice and consumption. Layering objects, people, and space with the social constructs of gendered material, I examine the symbolic violence of consumer culture. Utilizing ‘pretty’ [aesthetics], I am specifically confronting power systems dependent on compulsive consumption driven by the ‘therapeutic ethos’. Much of the work is designed to disintegrate over time, eventually existing only through documentation and remembered experience."