Bella Martinez: Ghost Notes

Bella Martinez: Ghost Notes

Through Sunday, Oct 4, 2026

Ghost notes are soft, muted notes in a musical composition that create subtle textural rhythm. The execution varies with instrument. While sometimes silent, they are foundational to the momentum and fluidity of a score. They are included in the musical notation.

In Ghost Notes, Bella Martinez explores inaudible moments—the space and time between things—and expands them. She describes her efforts to interpret these moments as glitches. Innocuous observations during a walk, such as spray-painted utility markings, become Martinez’s source material. Dappled sunlight and tree branch shadows are cast over street art still visible through a thin layer of paint haphazardly applied by the municipal graffiti abatement division. The mix of built environment, paint, and shadow, are layers of time, sanctioned and unsanctioned manmade, and nature intersecting. Finally, Martinez filters these observations through a digitally augmented reality, acknowledging the ways screens and headphones mediate experience.

Martinez works with a range of material, considering the three-dimensionality of her works. Her process layers texture. Beginning with digital collage, she then combines conventional mediums of acrylic and graphite with construction materials like drywall, carpet backing, mesh tape, and concrete. Through this process she explores the prospect of shifting from digital reality back to physical. Her interest in materiality is a response to a hyper-mediated society, where one is never just taking a walk without listening to a podcast, scrolling a feed, or even using one’s device to translate a solitary walk into content itself, to be fed back into an algorithm to be consumed by others. It grapples with stimulus as comfort.

Throughout this body of work, Martinez integrates various grids. In post-modern painting, the grid diverges from both its renaissance functionality and modernist abstraction. Today, the grid is emblematic of our physical and virtual built environments. The grid has become a symbol in its own right. It is evocative of the experience of the grids of our screens, of abstract experience superseding the experience of our physical environment. Martinez quietly address the confluence of digital and real-world experiences through her materials and processes and highlights the textures that break through the noise. It is fitting that Martinez’s “glitches” come at a moment when cracks are beginning to form in our digital environments, an uncanny mirror of municipal decay.

Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray
Curator and Exhibitions Director