image courtesy of Daniel Martin Diaz
For married couple and creative collaborators Daniel Martin Diaz and Paula Catherine Valencia, art is intimate, personal, daily. It is the shape of their lives.
For most of the past dozen years, the Tucson natives have spent their time garnering national and international acclaim for their music, released under the name Blind Divine, and for Diaz’s visual art, which has been lauded especially in outsider and Chicano art circles. They’ve gone from outsider status to licensing music to big name TV outfits, installing prominent public art and designing album covers for bands as big as Good Charlotte. Now they’re refocusing on their roots, opening a gallery at 245 E. Congress, Suite 123, in downtown Tucson.
It won’t be a gallery in the conventional sense, the couple promises. Sacred Machine, as the space is called, will be more of a museum and curiosity shop, a kind of extended personal journal in objects. The gallery will be a manifestation of the couple’s eclectic aesthetic. There will be T-shirts, chandeliers and a 15-stop harmonium.
It will also be a place for Diaz’s work to be displayed as a whole before scattering in the winds of commerce. The popularity of his images – tinged Gothic, Medieval and distinctly Tucsonan at once – have meant his work has rarely been shown locally. Instead, the paintings are often sent directly to collectors and far-flung exhibition spaces. “Even my friends don’t often get to see my work,” Diaz said. “But the Tucson community has been so supportive of me.”
The gallery could be seen as a way to offer back some of that support. “(Sacred Machine) is a metaphor for a place where creativity is happening,” Diaz said. It’s a reference to the body, to creation and the universe – to the ideas Diaz has spent 12 years rolling over and over in his head and his hand like the Platonic solids he can’t stop painting.
At the gallery, the couple hopes to extend to those who wander in inspiration and an artistic challenge. “Our hope is to involve artists and musicians who rarely have a platform for their art and to challenge those who do exhibit or perform often to experiment,” they said in the opening announcement. One of the two exhibition spaces in the gallery will feature another artist, beginning in May with oil painter Francisco Rodriguez.
The gallery may be the extension of a longstanding meditation, but it wasn’t exactly planned. Diaz and Valencia went to a meeting about downtown development in the storefront they later leased. “I was sitting there listening, and I started looking around. I started thinking, 'I want this space',” Valencia said.
The vacancy coincided with the couple’s ambition to reconnect with the Tucson community and a commitment by a clutch of businessmen to reinvigorate downtown entertainment with a monthly Second Saturdays event. Though Valencia and Diaz are disappointed that the new investment drove out several downtown galleries, they hope the development will increase the diversity of people coming downtown. They also hope that a dose of creativity will inspire more.
Sacred Machine will open unofficially for the May 8 inaugural Second Saturdays and then hold an official opening at 7 p.m. May 15. View Diaz’s art at DanielMartinDiaz.com and visit SacredMachine.com. Questions? Email Paula info@mysticuspublishing.com.
