FOCUS: Martine Gutierrez
On view through January 12, 2020
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Fort Worth, Texas
www.themodern.org
Martine Gutierrez’s photographs and videos explore gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as conventional ideals of beauty and identity as a social construct. Her most ambitious project to date, “Indigenous Woman,” 2018, is a glossy, 146-page publication that closely mirrors Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in form and production. Here, Gutierrez assumes the role of editor, writer, model, designer, ad executive, and photographer, with fictional advertising and high-fashion spreads where the artist continually reinvents herself throughout its pages. One section of the publication features her Demons series, in which Gutierrez assumes the role of Aztec deities – such as the goddess of beauty, Xochiquetza – that were later referred to as “demons” after the Spanish conquest. As the artist states, “‘Indigenous Woman’ marries the traditional to the contemporary, the native to the post-colonial, and the marginalized to the mainstream in the pursuit of genuine selfhood, revealing cultural inequities along the way. This is a quest for identity. Of my own specifically, yes, but by digging my pretty, painted nails deeply into the dirt of my own image I am also probing the depths for some understanding of identity as a social construction.” For her FOCUS exhibition, the artist will present photographs from the Indigenous Woman series.
Image: ©Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67 from “Indigenous Woman,” 2018 C-print mounted on Sintra. Edition of 8, plus 2 AP42 × 56 in. Courtesy of the Artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, NY
