Aruna D’Souza
A debut New York solo exhibition showcases the artist’s
inventiveness and sly humor.
Rachel Martin: Bending the Rules, installation view. Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight. Pictured, foreground: If our table could talk, 2024.
Rachel Martin: Bending the Rules, Hannah Traore Gallery, 150 Orchard Street, New York City, through November 9, 2024
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The centerpiece of Rachel Martin’s first New York solo exhibition is If our table could talk (2024). The drawing is displayed in the middle of the gallery, on a tabletop covered with clear plexiglass. Rendered in colored pencil on toothy, buff-colored paper are eight plates, each distinct in form and decoration. A dinner party, then, in which everyone eats a different repast, inflected by different experiences in the world, perhaps. On one plate is some grilled fish with peas and Kraft mac and cheese; on another, a massive king salmon head, slightly bloody at the gills; yet another holds a cheerful-looking crab, belly-up. Pilot bread, smoked fish, deer backstrap, caribou meat, a spitting clam—all these foods are reminders of Martin’s Tlingít homeland in Southeast Alaska. Some of the dishes are based on her own memories of eating with her family, others on meals her friends and families have described to her.
Rachel Martin, If our table could talk, 2024. Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight.
Food, Martin explained to me during a walk-through of the show, is a form of family wealth among the Tlingít, not to be bought or sold but only shared—to eat many of these treats, she either has to go back home and work at her community’s fish camps, or her loved ones send them to her in Queens, where she now lives. But that doesn’t mean customs haven’t changed with the times, for better and for worse. At her dinner party, Martin shows traditional victuals alongside products found on mainstream supermarket shelves; we also see delicacies that are under threat from commercial fishing and other environmental pressures, including the feathery, pale-yellow herring roe on one of the plates. (Hung on a nearby wall, HERRING PROTECTOR, 2021, a drawing of a nonhuman, vividly animate being sporting Nike trainers with herring roe where its lungs should be, is an homage to both the yaaw, or Pacific herring, and the Indigenous science that has protected our waters for millennia, the artist told me.)
Rachel Martin, HERRING PROTECTOR, 2021. Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 12 × 16 inches. Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight.
The title—If our table could talk—hints at other things going on, too. Martin, who grew up in Southern California and on the Fort Peck reservation in Montana, has only fairly recently begun to deepen her relationship to her estranged father and his Tlingít culture, spending time in Alaska and learning the language over Zoom from elders. Incorporating elements of Northwest Coast art into her work has run parallel to her linguistic education, a study that often occurs around kitchen tables. The foods that Martin portrays, as well as the distinctive graphic organicism she adopts in their depiction (especially, say, in the fish heads that circle one plate like a little starburst, and in the elaborate border of another), are, like language itself, a vital vehicle for telling the enduring stories of her ancestors, for creating her own stories, and for opening space for stories to come. The table is a place of gathering, of lively communion with friends and family, and in Martin’s sly and playful hands, even the food seems about to erupt into conversation—her crab has personality, and some of her pickle slices have human features.
Rachel Martin, Yéil’s Sock Money, 2023. Graphite and archival colored pencil on paper, 9 × 11 inches. Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight.
These ingredients—the contemporary endurance of tradition, the malleability of different forms of language to fit one’s circumstances, and the sometimes guffaw-inducing humor (did I mention the pickles?)—run through the rest of the drawings on show in terms of both subject matter and style. There is undeniable charm to images like Yéil’s Sock Money (2023), in which a figure whose head is a raven’s mask tucks twenties into his tube socks, or Night Light Baby (2024), where another masked figure, wearing a totally Gen Z getup of tighty-whities and a fuzzy T-shirt, carries an old-fashioned lantern. (In these and some other drawings of this type, the mask heads are rendered separately and glued onto the bodies, which are, in turn, only partially shown—delicate graphic lines trace them out incompletely, while socks and undies and sneakers are fully visible and colored in.) But what may seem like sweet jokes contain an important corrective to the way Tlingít masks and other ceremonial objects have been reduced to mere things in the context of the settler-colonial museum: Martin reanimates such masks in her drawings, reminding us that not only are they spirit-bearing ancestors of her community, but that they are in fact her Converse-wearing, bushy-eyebrowed, twerking, lovably imperfect, totally relatable relatives.
Rachel Martin: Bending the Rules, installation view. Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight. Pictured, far left: Night Light Baby, 2024.
Take note of the works that seem to adhere more closely to Northwest Coast visual idioms, and you will see the subtleties of Martin’s conceptual inventiveness. Jerky Princess Salmon Heart Hands (2024), for example, draws upon Tlingít formline, a compositional approach in which the figure is enclosed by boxy, curvilinear frames, and within those frames are nestled smaller, perfectly fit-together elements (ovoids, u-shapes, and so on) representing the figure’s internal anatomy, following relatively strict rules of symmetry, balance, and flow. The style is typically found in totem poles, weavings, and carvings, but also appears in two-dimensional work.
Rachel Martin, Jerky Princess Salmon Heart Hands, 2024. Archival colored pencil on paper, 42 × 44 1/4 inches. Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery. Photo: Evan Hunter McKnight.
Formline traditionally doesn’t allow for the representation of the female body, however. Martin’s practice shows us at once her deep study of the artistic idiom and her saucy transformation of it: her figure’s expected symmetry is interrupted by two breasts (and since when are boobs ever symmetrical?); one is seen in profile and the other head-on, nipples pointing in different directions. (The one on the left looks a bit like a big-eyed bird.) The being’s face, which otherwise hews relatively closely to the conventions of a Tlingít ancestor mask, sports lush red lips. Her hands, clutching strips of dried salmon, are adorned with long red acrylic nails—part fashion, part weapon, part protection. At the center of her torso, tucked perfectly between some u-shapes, is a tiny salmon heart.
Martin’s choice of materials throughout the show are not particularly archival. Like other modes of Northwest Coast Indian art—the totem poles that were weathered by their exposure to the elements, say, or the objects created for ceremonial rites that were made to be burned in the potlatch—her drawings have a lifespan, a fact she embraces. The image, despite its breaks with convention, isn’t so much anarchic as loving. There is a system here, an inherited vocabulary that makes possible Martin’s new articulations of contemporary Tlingít life, one that deepens as her knowledge of the languages, both verbal and visual, grows.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press this summer.