Erica Kelly Martin is a photographer and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work examines the artifacts and absurdities of American life through meticulously staged still lifes, human-inflected landscapes, and portraits that teeter between the sacred and the irreverent.
A former environmental attorney turned fine artist, Martin brings a perceptive eye to surreal domestic rituals, fusing humor, foreboding, and beauty in equal measure. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Photo London (2024, 2025, 2026), the Milan Image Art Fair (2019–2026), Fotofever Paris, Alta Vista Arts Paris, the Moving Lab in Venice, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts, and galleries across the United States. Art Tribune Magazine named her series Ten Thousand Untrue Things one of the best of MIA Fair 2023.
Her series examine how we relate to institutions, objects, cultural myths, and the stories we tell ourselves, inviting a reordering of what we hold sacred, what we inherit, and what we choose to discard. Whether unpacking the emotional impact of consumer culture and the things we hold on to (I'm Fine, Everything's Fine), delving into the American psyche on long drives through the boulevards and highways of the West (West of Truth), or reimagining the stories of women long silenced or misread (A Bee in the Rose), Martin probes the scaffolding of deeply rooted belief systems — personal, political, and paradoxical. She encourages us to reconfigure our relationship to objects, institutions, and inherited narratives, inviting us to question the shared fictions we've accepted as truth.
Martin serves on the Board of the Los Angeles Center for Photography and as an advisor to Pasadena Photography Arts. She is also a partner, a metalsmith, and the mother of two extraordinary humans, two dogs, a cat, and a considerable number of boxes.
