Yader Martinez

LGBTQ Awareness, 2019

Video art

Yader Martinez was born in Nicaragua and lived there until the age of five, when his family relocated to Miami, Florida. Although his family still lives in Miami, Martinez currently resides in Washington, DC, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in digital media with a specialization in photography from Gallaudet University in 2016. 

Martinez’s art makes heavy use of film and photography, but admits that the medium he finds most expressive and therapeutic is drawing—or, as he calls it, “doodling.” He has also acted in various productions.

The video Martinez created for this exhibit uses Animoji, a face-mapping digital technology created by Apple that allows users to create videos in which their faces are replaced with digital characters. Given Martinez’s taste for experimentation and creating odd or ironic things that push people to think a little differently, he found himself gripped by this new technology and felt pushed to tell a story in a way new to him.

Says Martinez: “I think art is a free kind of speech, thought, spirituality, form, color…art is really a language and expression of its own. There’s a sort of internal texture to it that’s amazing and really shows the beauty of the mind.”

IG: https://www.instagram.com/greenyaderphotography/