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    Martine Gutierrez: Monsen Photography Lecture

     
    Upper Level Gallery
    March 30, 2024 — July 28, 2024
    Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA) is a transdisciplinary artist, performing, writing, composing, and directing elaborate narrative scenes that subvert pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity. Through works created in diverse media—music videos, billboard campaigns, episodic films, photographs, live performance artworks, and publications —Gutierrez investigates identity as both a social construct and an authentic expression of self. These complex intersections are innate to Gutierrez’s own multicultural upbringing as a first-generation artist of Indigenous descent, her transgender identity, and as an LGBTQ+ ally.
    In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, a single-issue 124-page magazine, working as her own muse, model, photographer, editor, and art director, and dedicated to, as the artist describes it, “the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity and the ever-evolving self-image.” In the recent series Body En Thrall, which started in Indigenous Woman, the artist embodies a character, now blonde, who acts alongside male and female mannequins to explore the limits of her own erotic power. Sought after by women across the cultural and socio-political spectrum, the blonde that Gutierrez studies and embodies is hyper-visible and over-exposed. With an eye on the simultaneous desirability and tragedy of Hollywood’s innumerable “fallen” blonde starlets, the artist delivers an inquisitive, if not irreverent look at the cultural trap society has laid out for a specific, narrow, and ultimately infeasible idea of womanhood.
    This presentation is organized in conjunction with Gutierrez’s Monsen Photography Lecture on May 17, 2024. This annual lecture brings key makers and thinkers in photographic practice to the Henry. Named after Drs. Elaine and Joseph Monsen, the series is designed to further knowledge about and appreciation for the art of photography.

    Artist Bio

    Martine Gutierrez is a transdisciplinary artist. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films, music videos, and the renowned magazine, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Through her examination of advertising, Gutierrez creates a hybrid of the industry’s objectification of sex with the individual’s pursuit of self, satirically undermining the aesthetics of what we know. While she manufactures ‘celebrity’ to pass as multinational corporations, it is Gutierrez herself who executes every role—simultaneously acting as subject, artist, and muse. Challenging the construction of binaries through the blurring of their borders, Gutierrez insists that gender, like all things, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. Her malleable, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation. Read the artist’s full biography here.
    CREDITS

    Martine Gutierrez is organized by Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs.

    Related Programs

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<p>Martine Gutierrez, 2023. &copy; Martine Gutierrez; Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.</p>
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    Talks & Performances

    Monsen Photography Lecture: Martine Gutierrez

    May 17, 2024