Patrick Martinez - Homegrown

Over the summer of 2021, Oxy Arts launched "Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A.", a remote summer residency program. Over a 3-month period, artists Nancy Baker-Cahill, Audrey Chan, Joel Garcia with Meztli Projects and Patrick Martinez researched and developed original virtual monuments to be geo-located at sites across Los Angeles. The monuments are accessible for the public to view through the 4th Wall app.
The prompt for the residency was to conceive a blueprint for a site-specific imagined future, and consider technologically enabled transformations that might shape the future of the site.
Patrick Martinez created Homegrown. Homegrown is a monument that anticipates a future in Los Angeles where affordable housing is accessible to people who have lived here for generations; where community members are valued for their presence in the city. Martinez built on his extensive practice working with neon and hand painted signage to create a new kind of sculpture. The artwork uses the language of the neon as a protest sign, and blends it with a real estate post. This combination of two familiar types of advertising language get combined in an unfamiliar way. Hovering above an empty lot in Highland Park, it demands that we imagine a new trajectory for the city and not settle for a future where luxury developments continue to proliferate, while families continue to be displaced.
Learn more at www.oxy.edu/ox...