“The space between the binaries is the only place to find complete freedom,” Martine Gutierrez has said. Playing with the conventions of fashion and editorial photography, her work questions how identity is formed and valued by mass media. Across mediums, the artist presents an ever-evolving image of herself.
The three photographs featured here appeared on the cover and in the pages of Indigenous Woman (2018), a glossy magazine that Gutierrez published as an art book and for which she served as editor-in-chief, photographer, and model. The fashion spreads and fictional advertisements in the publication rethink categories of race and gender. Included among the illustrations are works in which the artist depicts herself as an Indigenous Maya woman from the highlands of Guatemala and as tzitzimime, or Aztec deities, styled in ornate headpieces and jewelry. “I was looking for iconography that celebrated bodies outside of the binary,” she explains, “deities even bigger than bodies—because in general we tend to see ourselves in a god’s image, whatever god that may be.”
