Martine Gutierrez | |
|---|---|
 Gutierrez at the Venice Biennale | |
| Born | Martín Gutierrez April 16, 1989 Berkeley, CA |
| Alma mater | Rhode Island School of Design |
| Website | www |
Martine Gutierrez (born Martín Gutierrez,[1][2] April 16, 1989)[3] is an American visual and performance artist whose work is about how identity is formed, expressed, and perceived. They have created music videos, billboard campaigns, episodic films, photographs, live performance artworks, and a satirical fashion magazine investigating identity as both a social construct and an authentic expression of self.[4] Gutierrez's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, notably the Central Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale.[5]
Gutierrez received a BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 2012.[6] Following graduation, they moved to New York City.[7]
In 2013 Gutierrez's Real Dolls (2013), a series of photographs depicting their performance of four different life-size sex dolls in various domestic settings, was exhibited alongside their multi-part video Martine Pt 1-3 in their first solo exhibition held at the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York.[6] Images from this series were shown in Disturbing Innocence, a group exhibition curated by Eric Fischl which took place at the FLAG art Foundation in 2014.[8]
Gutierrez's Real Dolls images were also included in the 2015 exhibition About Face at Dartmouth's Hood Museum, which explored how contemporary artists have investigated identity as a culturally constructed phenomenon.[9]
In 2014 Gutierrez created the photographic series Lineups, where they are dressed and posed to blend seamlessly with groups of glamorous female mannequins staged in highly stylized tableaux.[10] Miss Rosen, who interviewed Gutierrez about LineUps, writes, "Martine embodies some of the most seductive and alluring images of the feminine, revealing the ways in which the body becomes the work of art itself, ready to be cast in the shape of our ideals."[11]
Gutierrez's 2015 exhibition at Ryan Lee Gallery, Martín Gutierrez: Can She Hear You, included photographs, an installation of disassembled mannequins, paintings, and music videos.[12]
Through experimentation with various artistic techniques and processes, Gutierrez's artworks inspire and ignite a multitude of conversations relating to complex social topics and issues.[citation needed] In a 2018 Vice interview with Gutierrez, Miss Rosen notes:
Gutierrez uses art to explore the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class as they inform her life experience. The Brooklyn-based artist uses costume, photography, and film to produce elaborate narrative scenes that combine pop culture tropes, sex dolls, mannequins, and self-portraiture to explore the ways in which identity, like art, is both a social construction and an authentic expression of self.[13]
#MartineJeans (2016) was a 10 ft × 22 ft (3m × 6.7m) fictional advertisement Gutierrez produced for a billboard at the corner of 37th Street and 9th Avenue in New York City in December 2016.[14][better source needed][15] Completed during their Van Lier Fellowship in residence at ISCP, Gutierrez's public art project was created with support from the New York Community Trust, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts.[14][better source needed] The billboard portraying them topless, wearing only jeans, was designed by Gutierrez to look like a real advertising campaign for a high-end fashion brand with themselves as model.[14][better source needed] Gutierrez's interest in producing a body of work continuing the concept of #MartineJeans evolved into their satirical fashion magazine Indigenous Woman (2018).[15]
Girlfriends (2014) is a series of black-and-white photographs throughout which Gutierrez poses with a single mannequin, creating ambiguous characters within changing realities.[16][better source needed] Composed and shot in upstate New York at the cottage of Gutierrez's grandmother,[17] the photographs depict three different couples, each of whom Gutierrez appears to match with their mannequin counterpart. Gutierrez's use of mannequins is apparent in Girlfriends, as with many of their artworks. During the mid-1960s, the form of the mannequin experienced an artistic change in which it was used to "…convey a feeling of overwhelming reality, convincing spectators…that they may be standing next to a real person. This illusion would be achieved by suggesting movement through pose and through the display artist's staging of the mannequin in a way that felt 'real'."[18] Commenting on their usage of the medium, Gutierrez emphasizes the idealistic aspect of mannequins.[19]
Indigenous Woman (2018) is a 146-page art publication (masquerading as a glossy fashion magazine).[4][20] The art critic Andrea K. Scott writes of the project, "The [magazine's] front and back covers are clearly modeled on Andy Warhol's Interview, down to the jagged cursive font that spells out the title. Inside, a hundred and forty-six pages are filled with Vogue-worthy fashion spreads—and the ad campaigns that make them possible—featuring Gutierrez playing the roles of an entire agency's worth of models. In addition to posing, [Gutierrez] also took every picture, styled every outfit, and designed all the layouts."[21] For her FOCUS exhibition, the artist will present photographs from the Indigenous Woman series.[22]
Gutierrez's music has been used by Dior and Acne Studios in video editorials, and Saint Laurent set its 2012 resort collection video to their single "Hands Up."[23]
In 2014, Gutierrez's site-specific large-scale video installation RedWoman91 (2014), of Gutierrez posing in an "advertising red" jumpsuit, exuding "withering sexual power alternating with hesitant vulnerability", was installed in the windows of Ryan Lee Gallery New York, positioned to be visible to those walking on the High Line.[23]
They collaborated with i-D in 2015, co-directing a music video with musician Ssion that stars Gutierrez alongside mannequins dressed in costumes by French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus. The video "The Girl For Me" accompanies music written and produced by Gutierrez.[24]
Beginning as an installation commissioned by Aurora in 2015, Gutierrez produced and performed in collaboration with musician Nomi Ruiz in Origin, a digitally streaming selfie performance simultaneously filmed in front of a live audience.[25] The music, produced by Gutierrez originally written for Ruiz to perform, also titled Origin, was released on iTunes in 2018.[26]
Gutierrez's nine-part film Martine Part I-IX (2012–2016) dismantles gender identity through a semi-autobiographical story of their personal transformation. They spent six years creating the work and premiered the final segment in 2016 in their solo exhibition We & Them & Me, at the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, North Carolina.[1] It was also exhibited in their solo exhibition True Story at the Boston University Art Gallery in 2016.[27]
Filmed in Brooklyn, Tulum, Oakland, and Miami, Gutierrez produced and directed the music video Apathy (2018) for their song of the same name.[28]
In 2019 they wrote, produced, and performed in Circle, an immersive live performance series held at Performance Space New York.[29] The sci-fi thriller casts Gutierrez as Eve, an alien held captive by a secret bio weaponry cooperation[dubious ] known as Circle.[30]
Guiterrez's artworks were exhibited in the 58th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Ralph Rugoff.[5] They exhibited photographs from Indigenous Woman including images from their Body En Thrall and Demons series.[31]
In 2019 Gutierrez's work was presented in the solo exhibitions Martine Gutierrez Body en Thrall at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst[citation needed] and Life / Like: Photographs, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley.[32] Gutierrez's work was included in Crack Up - Crack Down, Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts curated by Slavs and Tatars;[33] Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, UK;[34] Transamerica/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX;[35] and in Be Seen: Portrait Photography Since Stonewall, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT which explored how artists have used portrait photography to challenge, subvert, and play with societal norms of gender and sexuality.[36]
In 2019, photographs from the Gutierrez's Indigenous Woman series were exhibited in their solo exhibition Focus: Martine Gutierrez, organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.[37] The installation, on view 2019 through 2020, included images from the series Queer Rage, and several advertisements from Indigenous Woman. Gutierrez also installed a site-specific 15 ft × 70 ft (4.6m × 22m) mural in the gallery depicting a fanciful colonial landscape.[37]
Artworks by Gutierrez are in the collections of:
Gutierrez's photograph Masking, Starpepper Mask (detail) (2018) from Indigenous Woman (2018) was the January 2019 cover of Artforum.[40]
Gutierrez's photograph Demons, Tlazoteotl, Eater of Filth from Indigenous Woman (2018) was the cover of RISDXYZ, Spring/Summer 2019.[41]
Gutierrez's series Showgirls Of The Mountains was commissioned for Swarovski Book of Dreams, volume 3, 2019, and shows Swarovski crystal jewelry designed by Gutierrez with Michael Schmidt.[42]
A set of self-portraits of Gutierrez titled Xotica created in Tulum Mexico, appeared in Garage, issue 16, 2019.[7]
Interview commissioned Catfight, group portraits of Gutierrez and their friends, print April 2019.[43] The fashion shoot styled by Gutierrez is documented in a behind the scenes video.[citation needed] Gutierrez comments in Interview:
Magazines and advertising and now, more than ever, social media, are the codes that the next generation is learning from. Being a trans woman of color, it's like, no shade, but don't just invite us in. Give us marginalized folks autonomy over our own image so that we can at least voice our own ideas instead of them being appropriated by the mainstream.[43]
Gutierrez was born April 16, 1989, in Berkeley, California,[3] and moved to Vermont during high school. They have an American mother and a Guatemalan father.[20] The art critic Barbara Calderon writes of Gutierrez's personal identity, "The art, fashion, and media worlds use terms like Latinx, indigenous, trans, queer, and bi-racial to describe [Gutierrez], but these labels often function as reductive shorthand for a range of experiences."[20]
2015 was the last year in which Gutierrez was published identifying with male or gender neutral pronouns before transitioning to female pronouns.[10]
In 2020 Gutierrez was living and working in Brooklyn, New York.[7]
