Christopher Martin’s
There’s Life and Death, Everything In-Between Is Just Vibes (2025) distills existential reflection into an aphorism of serene acceptance and wry humor. The piece features a white scroll struck through by a single black arrow — its bold black text reading:
“
THERE’S LIFE & DEATH
EVERYTHING IN-BETWEEN
IS JUST VIBES.”
The work fuses philosophy and playfulness, articulating a worldview that is both grounded and transcendent. In typical Martin fashion, a single sentence becomes a meditative field: concise, rhythmically structured, and disarmingly simple. The phrase reframes life’s complexity with calm detachment — suggesting that between birth and mortality, existence is an ongoing experience of perception, mood, and energy rather than fixed meaning.
Visually, the piece continues Martin’s refined sculptural language — the crisp monochrome palette, deliberate typography, and dynamic curvature of the scroll invite contemplation. The arrow serves as a metaphor for focus and fate, simultaneously piercing the surface and anchoring the thought in physical space. Its intrusion transforms the text into something alive — a moment of impact frozen in time, echoing the tension between finality and flow.
Conceptually, There’s Life and Death… captures Martin’s deep engagement with impermanence and presence. It bridges Eastern philosophy’s embrace of transience with contemporary cultural idiom — “vibes” as shorthand for experiential consciousness. The statement reads like a Zen proverb disguised as a pop phrase, merging sincerity with irony in a way that feels distinctly of this era.
Through its elegant restraint and existential clarity, There’s Life and Death, Everything In-Between Is Just Vibes encapsulates Martin’s practice: the pursuit of insight through simplicity, humor as a vehicle for truth, and the gentle reminder that being alive — in all its fleeting vibrations — is enough.
