The Houses Are Blind, but the Trees Can See by Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz

Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz form a collaborative multimedia art team and have been professional and personal partners since 1993. They are best known for their sculptures and photographs of snow globes and larger underwater sets contrasting pristine settings with foreboding or grisly scenes. They have exhibited widely in museums and art galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe.

The exhibition at the Cervantes Institute will include the ongoing photo series “Blind House” as well as two new sculptures, a subtle but transformative intervention in the Institute’s courtyard, and an augmented reality sculpture.

Central to this latest exhibition is the series Blind House, first seen at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery. “Each of these 17 photographs of houses within commuting distance of New York City has been digitally altered to mask the windows seamlessly. These windowless houses come across as lacking souls –not just blind, as the title suggests, but eyeless,” says Sarah Rose Sharp in Hyperallergic.

The Blind House series began in 2013 and was conceived as a metaphor for the radical opacity necessary to survive in the age of spyware, identity theft, brain hacking, and corporate and state surveillance. Now though, after two pandemic years, this series reads less as a metaphor and more as a series of real options from a catalog of pandemic bunkers. Most of the works in the exhibition pick up on the theme of quarantine isolation: the looniness that comes with cabin fever and the unexpected new relationships made in the absence of human contact.