Martine Gutierrez is an artist, performer, writer, and musician who constructs elaborate narrative scenes to subvert pop cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personal and collective—intersectional to race, gender, class, indigeneity, and culture. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards and episodic films to music videos and renowned magazine Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Gutierrez hybridizes 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.
For her exhibition at CAM, Gutierrez creates a site-specific multimedia experience for visitors. The artist presents HIT MOVIE: Vol. 1, a video collage of sorts, featuring numerous femme fatale characters performed, costumed, and directed by Gutierrez. A trailer of the video is projected on CAM’s facade as part of Street Views and a photograph is on view in the Front Gallery.
Martine Gutierrez: HIT MOVIE: Vol. 1 is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator.
Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist, performer, and musician, whose earlier bodies of work explore gender, intimacy, and fantasy. Current and recent exhibitions of her work include Disturbing Innocence, curated by Eric Fischl at the FLAG Art Foundation; About Face: Self-Portraiture in Contemporary Art, at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, where her work is also included in the permanent collection. Her solo exhibitions include the reinstallation of Supremacy at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Half-Breed, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, (2021); Martine Gutierrez ‘Body en Thrall’, Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, AU (2020); FOCUS: Martine Gutierrez, Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, (2019); and the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh’s WE & THEM & ME (2016). She is part of the group exhibition In Some Form or Fashion at The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2021). Other selected group exhibitions include True Pictures? Contemporary Photography from Canada and the USA, Sprengel Museum Hannover, DE (2021); Infinite Identities: Photography in the Age of Sharing, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); and Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London (2019).
