Nearing Each Other: Bryan Martello

Nearing Each Other, the 89th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Series, invites us to reimagine our own complex connections to place as a site of unfolding relationships. In this exhibition, place may be an environment, a material experience, or a memory to suggest notions of belonging and transformation.

Bryan Martello’s series of darkroom prints, Second Story (2024), features stills from a digitized 1992 home video by Martello’s mother. The video documents the artist’s father building a second story addition onto the family’s Massachusetts home. Martello’s process includes enlarging the images to emphasize digital noise from the film footage and improperly fixing the prints to manipulate the images’ sensitivity to light. The series juxtaposes smaller photographs of the house’s exterior under construction, framed with inkjet mats typical of Martello’s practice, with a quiet, almost ghostly mosaic of 25 individual stills that portray his childhood bedroom. Like memories, this body of work shifts between ambiguity and specificity, feeling tangible yet distant.