Nikki Berger Martinez is a Tucson based artist and educator working in found object sculpture, film, photography, performance art, theatre, land art and placemaking. She holds her MFA from Yale and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She spent her early career in NYC and abroad studying experimental forms of theatre with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, at the Trinity LaMama Performing Arts Program, The Fordham/Orvieto Theater Institute and The Workcenter of Jerzy Growtowski and Thomas Richards. Her sculptural work was chosen for the Tucson Museum of Arts’ Biennial 2023 and has been shown at Untitled Gallery, The Steinfeld -as part of Creation In Isolation, Cultivate Tucson and Cero. She is a recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Exchange Space Grant and recently completed an artist in residency at Catalyst through SAACA with her company Chaos Theatre. She currently teaches acting at the University of Arizona.

Artists Statement

My artistic process is an act of questioning that centers on the idea of beauty in the unexpected and the experience of transformation as it is coupled with death and decay. Using principles of emergent strategy as it is posed by Adrienne Marie Brown “the way complex plans for action and complex systems for being together arise out of relatively simple interactions,” I propose to reframe our communal relationship to the ever-growing collection of waste material that populates our planet. How we relate to matter may be as important as what the matter is in and of itself. Instead of thinking “about” the material I think “from” it, evoking an invitation for interaction rather than imposing a preconceived notion of usage. My work is ephemeral, non-archival; and embraces disappearance and loss as vital to evolution.

My sculptural work is made from found and foraged materials gathered from areas in my surroundings. I collect discarded organic and industrial waste materials and minimally arrange them to evoke a sense of growth, renewal, and emerging fullness. The objects that arise are sustainable, zero-cost and zero-waste.

My site-specific performance and community-based work utilizes the same premise while exposing the existing aesthetic potentialities in space and highlighting them with reclaimed, repurposed found object and/or ceremonial movement.

In this ritualistic pattern of recognition for the animism of matter I propose regard for the discarded, use for the useless and placemaking for the liminal. For me making art from what was not honored is to alchemize an imprisoned past into potentiality, fecundity, and freedom.

If this depth of regard can exist for the “inanimate” how might this lens of respect, care and attentiveness spill over into the ways in which we view each other and ourselves?