“How can we work against the very power structures that propagate beauty and normalcy to the masses?”
Martine Gutierrez is an artist skilled in commanding the gaze. Working across photography, moving image, and performance, she subverts traditional notions of beauty, gender, celebrity, and identity with a gleeful irreverence. With their faux-opulent styling and stark contrasts, Gutierrez’s images often parrot the glamor of luxury advertising while doubling as layered critiques of consumerism and Western standards of beauty.
Born in Berkeley, California, in 1989 to a white American mother and a Guatemalan father of Maya descent, Gutierrez grew up between Oakland, California, and central Vermont. From an early age, she pored over music videos, fashion magazines, and Hollywood films, building a fluency in the glamorous illusions that underpin US popular culture. As she explains, “I grew up making what I wanted or didn’t have…costumes, macaroni necklaces, dolls. I was an excessively creative child, drawing, dancing, and dressing up every day.”
After earning her MFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, Gutierrez moved to New York, where she began exhibiting photography, video, and performance work that examined and often spoofed common conventions of class and propriety. All the while, Gutierrez was also composing and producing music. She released her first solo EP, Amelia, in 2012, and her songs have since been featured in campaigns by major fashion brands.
For Gutierrez, who is trans and identifies as nonbinary, wielding the visual language of advertising has become a potent strategy for critiquing the performative nature of mainstream femininity, as well as its obsession with celebrity. In Indigenous Woman, the 2018 artist’s book that remains one of her most widely exhibited projects, the artist appropriates the format and style of a fashion magazine’s September issue, traditionally its most robust, revered edition. “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own,” Gutierrez explained. The result is a 120-plus-page exercise in satire, fluidity, and self-definition in the face of an industry built on objectification.
Working both in front of and behind the camera as the magazine’s muse, model, photographer, stylist, editor-in-chief, and publisher, Gutierrez crafts a cast of characters that populate the magazine’s numerous editorials and mock-ad spreads, carving out her own space in a realm traditionally defined by exclusivity. In Indigenous Woman, each persona reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in the archetype of the supermodel, which she sees as a physical embodiment of the West’s exclusionary beauty ideals: “The Supermodel isn’t just skinny and tall—she's epitomized as perfection,” Gutierrez explains. “It’s all so ingrained within cis culture that anyone who is Trans or [nonbinary] is forced to maneuver through the Supermodel propaganda as well. No matter the trends or decades, ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine,’ it’s all just drag— accentuating features that are culturally assigned as female or male.”
In Body En Thrall, an image drawn from the magazine’s editorial of the same name, Gutierrez plays the part of an archetypal femme fatale, her bare arms and legs wrapped seductively around a presumed lover as they stand by a crystalline swimming pool. But Gutierrez unravels the fantasy even as she presents it: the seemingly male figure is in fact a mannequin, as plastic and artificial as the highly gendered illusions such props are typically used to peddle.
In Neo-Indeo, Cakchiquel Calor, Gutierrez challenges the stale, colonial gaze through which Indigenous peoples and cultures are often presented. As if on a runaway, her character stands defiantly in profile, modeling a Cakchiquel cinta, huipil, and corte (a traditional Maya head scarf, blouse, and skirt, respectively), her stature rebutting the “typical tropes of nostalgia, poverty, and antiquity.” The garments presented include textiles that belonged to Gutierrez’s Mayan grandmother as well as those preserved by her parents’ nonprofit for cultural posterity. Indigenous Woman, then, is a testament to “a contemporary living history, not one that is just buried,” as Gutierrez herself notes. “Neo-Indio: A Modern Collection of Traditional Mayan Trajes of Guatemala,” the full editorial, affirms Gutierrez’s focus on upending static conceptions of identity, particularly when it comes to communities that have been othered by a dominant culture.
Dessane Lopez Cassell, independent scholar, 2024
Note: opening quote is from Gutierrez, Martine. “Demi-Celebrity: Martine.” Indigenous Woman. 2018. 89.
