Join the Polygon for a conversation with Martine Gutierrez led by Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis Curator Elliott Ramsey.

Doors at 6:30pm

Artist Talk at 7:00pm

RSVPs are helpful

Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO Financial Group

Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis is on view July 12 – September 29.

About Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis
What does it mean to be an icon and who, or what, becomes iconic? Icons carry authority, in their highly symbolic and instant recognisability. The new, landmark series Anti-Icon: Apokalypsis, by acclaimed photographer Martine Gutierrez, refuses ready understandings of identity, gender, and culture. Across seventeen self-portraits, Gutierrez embodies a pantheon of legendary figures – all female or feminized – from across the world’s legends, histories, and myths. Her re-imaginings of such endlessly reproduced figures reference the long visual lineages in which these images circulate – from traditional iconography and Renaissance painting to contemporary fashion editorials and pop media – while offering an interpretation that challenges all these depictions. Through the “anti-icon”, Gutierrez stretches the malleability of the self, and of the social imagination that shapes it.

About Martine Gutierrez
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.

About Elliott Ramsey
Elliott Ramsey is Curator of The Polygon Gallery, based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ First Nations. He holds a Master of Arts in Comparative Media Arts (2015) from Simon Fraser University. Ramsey is an alumnus of the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Professional Alliance for Curators of Colour, has served on numerous advisories and art juries including the Sobey Award, and his recent exhibition As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic, presented by Aperture and featuring works from the Toronto-based Wedge Collection, is currently touring.

Banner image: Martine Gutierrez, Elizabeth from ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS (detail), 2021. Courtesy the artist; RYAN LEE, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Josh Lilley, London.