Orlando artists Mär Martinez and Leah Sandler respond to personal and global crises with gallows humor

Quarter Life / Crisis! comes at us as the 2000s brush up against the quarter-century milestone. The artists behind this exhibit are Mär Martinez and Leah Sandler, both themselves in the vicinity of the quarter-century mark. Previous generations were only granted a midlife crisis as an excuse to fall apart, but this generation has an early one to celebrate, responding to the multi-crisis-riddled 21st century by doing what they do best: making art.

Martinez and Sandler’s art party is billed as an imaginary sleepover, and if you come you will enjoy an absurdist viewpoint of today’s Heisenbergian world. (Save you the Wikipedia trip: Physicist Werner Heisenberg hypothesized the uncertainty principle.) Sandler’s Mylar installation, “This Party Balloon Is an Organ and an Airship,” will drift gently over guests’ heads. Underfoot, a Roomba festooned as a marauding house flipper (“There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute”) will disrupt partygoers’ conversations like an annoyingly utilitarian pet.

In between, the two artists document our nowtimes using dark humor with more installations and conceptual sculptures, photos and paintings, grappling with all of the crises in their current life lineup. Also, there will be cake.

You can come for the cake. Or you can cherish the Dada of it all, lean into the anxiety a little, laugh at our collective lack of control over this slow-motion car crash of a world, and witness a piñata filled with parking tickets, glitter and receipts (Martinez’s performance-activated sculpture “Ultraviolet Death & Taxes”) being whacked but good. The cathartic explosion might be just what you need.

Quarter Life / Crisis! runs from Jan.27 to March 29 at the Casselberry Sculpture House.


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