Artist Bio

Martin Byrne is an architect and artist based in Los Angeles. He received degrees in architecture from Penn State University and Pratt Institute and was awarded a fellowship to the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, Russia, in 2017.

His work moves between architecture, photography, collage, poetry, speculative fiction, and architectural fiction. Across these forms, he investigates the spaces, systems, and narratives that emerge around contemporary infrastructure and the landscapes it produces. His work has been exhibited in New York, London, Utrecht, Budapest, and Moscow, and has been published by a range of independent publishers.

Artist Statement

My work explores the landscapes and structures that emerge alongside contemporary systems of production, logistics, communication, and control. I am drawn to places where infrastructure exceeds or fails its intended purpose and begins to produce unexpected conditions: vacant lots, utility corridors, abandoned facilities, roadside ecologies, industrial edges, and accidental wildernesses. These spaces often exist beyond categorization. They are neither fully natural nor fully designed, neither abandoned nor actively maintained. They occupy a shifting territory where alternative ways of seeing, inhabiting, and imagining the world can briefly take hold. They are holes in our default reality.

Across photography, writing, collage, and speculative narrative, I investigate how these environments shape our collective imagination. I am interested in moments of malfunction, illegibility, and adaptation—instances when systems become porous, when unintended possibilities emerge, and when new relationships between people, technology, and landscape become visible. Rather than proposing solutions, the work attempts to linger within uncertainty and examine what kinds of futures might already be latent within the present.

My photographic practice grew from a desire to identify and describe these spaces, but gradually became an effort to document those already in existence. Because such conditions are often by their nature transient, photography serves as a form of witness. The camera becomes a tool for preserving atmosphere and circumstance before they are reabsorbed into more familiar forms.

The subjects of these images rarely announce themselves as significant. They are the spaces encountered at the edge of attention: an empty storefront, a freeway interchange, a puddle clouded with concrete dust, a battered service entrance, a vacant lot overtaken by weeds. Architectural and urban theorists have proposed countless names for such places—edgelands, junkspaces, drosscapes, subnatures, heterotopias—but no term fully captures them. What interests me is not their classification but their presence and their influence. They are the unintended landscapes of contemporary life: overlooked, provisional, and deeply woven into the world we have built.

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