Erica Kelly Martin

Images from the American West

       I grew up in the American West.  Mostly in Los Angeles, which sometimes puts a glossy veneer on the American Dream.  On family vacations, we would get in the car, or the camper on my Grandpa’s truck, and drive to the wilder places.  Long highways leading to small towns, and vast vistas.  Places where churches and strip clubs exist on the same block, where one can buy homemade ice cream, assault weapons, knitting supplies or taxidermy all at the local drugstore.  Or where, looking the other direction, the untamed view takes ones breath away.  Many of the places I have photographed are changing rapidly, making way for high rises, strip malls, and box stores.

      There is something quintessentially American about the big highways and lonesome winds, the strange glimpses of the selling of dreams, of momentary pleasures and necessities, the fortune tellers and coffee shops, the sacred next to the profane.  America is struggling at the moment, about which way to go, which side to choose, which road to follow.  The divides of race, gender, class, and tribe are ever more clearly drawn. With images of my hometown, and the roads leading out from it to the horizon, I am attempting to navigate the wilderness. 

I’m Fine, Everything’s Fine assembles the artifacts of our ever faster unraveling—ritual objects for an apocalypse on many fronts. Fast food and pink relief for heart burn and nausea. Tarot cards and shipping labels. Each still life is part obituary, part altar, documenting the strange comforts and consumer detritus we clutch as the news cycles spin and the planet burns. The compositions walk the line between sincerity and satire. They ask: What if this is the new normal?  They are both a self-portrait of daily life, and a country in chaos, as well as a quiet scream into the void of late stage capitalism.  

Here are the wilting sixtieth birthday flowers, the insects that invade, the stuff we hoped would make us feel safe, the decaying fruit that we forgot to eat, the birds that few into the walls of glass, the talismans of hope for the future. Set against the sometimes chaotic outside world, here are the mundane and magical objects we accumulate bring comfort in these wild times.

While the world keeps glitching—climate collapse, indictments, an algorithmic spiral—we keep lighting scented candles and hitting "add to cart."  Perhaps this is what the end looks like: not a fireball or a reckoning, but a pile of Amazon boxes, half a bottle of tequila, and a Magic 8 Ball, which is as good an oracle as any.  That and cats quietly judging us all.

My earliest books were ancient myths and legends, which I memorized by heart. Many of those stories were framed as warnings. Their archetypes endure, shaping identity, expectation, and consequence in ways most people no longer recognize as mythological. These stories function like hidden instructions still running in the background of modern culture.

Inspired by recent literary works, such as Circe and Stone Blind, which restore voice to women once peripheral or silenced, I began questioning which stories I had accepted, and whose perspectives had shaped me.

These portraits recognize those legacies while refusing their conclusions. Some employ tonal inversion, where light works against its usual logic, upending convention and offering another way of seeing. Across the series, women are present on their own terms, and one can imagine that the endings of their stories are not yet written.