Visual

SPRING 2022

Robert Martin

Queerness is not absent from the American hinterland. In fact, I see it everywhere. The trouble comes from a lack of acknowledgement, and the bleeding of human heteronormative perceptions over the natural, fluid environment. I am using the visual language of ruralcore art to communicate queer themes, identities, and storylines within middle America in a way that is legible to an unaddressed community. I am interested in generating conversation over critique; between the queer community and rural America, between the canonized fine arts and the commodified wildlife arts, across wealth brackets and beyond a gender binary. Here, I illustrate my journey in employing wildlife as symbolism, and ultimately, the importance of shining light on the queerness that exists around us.

As an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin Stout, I began producing work that reflected the various facets of my identity—as a homosexual, as a Midwesterner, as a Catholic-raised agnostic—with intentional nuance. I permitted myself to speak subtly of homosexuality under a perceivable guise of wildlife art. The red northern cardinal was used as a stand-in for the flamboyant, flashy male I understood myself to be. In my BFA thesis work, a pairing of bright red cardinals communicated homosexual relations. Following the completion of my degree, I was uncertain if I felt comfortable continuing to employ male birds as symbols of my own sexuality. I questioned my gender identity, and found more assurance in “queerness” over “homosexuality.”

In January of 2019, the winter after I came out as nonbinary, articles began circulating featuring a northern cardinal photographed by Shirley and Jeffrey Caldwell of Erie, Pennsylvania. The headlines read like flyers for a circus sideshow: “Bizarre Half-Male, Half-Female Bird Discovered In Pennsylvania” on Forbes; “Rare half-male, half-female cardinal spotted in Pennsylvania” for National Geographic; “This Bird’s Body Is Half Male, Half Female. So Is Its Brain” in Live Science; “A Rare Bird Indeed: A Cardinal That’s Half Male, Half Female” in the New York Times. Through the sensationalism, I found a grounding sort of comfort after being made aware of this gender deviation. While the press painted it as a sort of freak of nature, this species was, once again, providing me the external validation I sought.

In growing up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, I’ve observed queerness in nature, even before I fully comprehended human queerness, but this was the first instance wherein the difference felt like a true reflection of my own identity. Bilateral gynandromorphism isn’t exactly congruent to human non-binariness. As Michelle Starr writes for Science Alert, the northern cardinal is exhibiting “a type of genetic chimerism, whereby a single animal has more than one set of DNA. More specifically, it’s a type of tetragametic chimerism, so-named because it involves four (tetra) gametes—two sperm and two ova.” Here, the “split” happens because two fertilized ova fuse together early on during development, becoming one blastocyst or zygote. Still, the bird provided a visual representation for my liminal feelings around gender identity: a concrete symbol in nature.

Robert Martin

Robert Martin earned their BFA in studio art (drawing and sculpture) from the University of Wisconsin Stout in 2017 and their MFA in studio practices (painting and drawing) at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012. They have exhibited works at Bermudez Projects in Los Angeles, 1969 Gallery in New York, GOCA in Colorado Springs, Sierra Arts Gallery in Reno, IDS Tower in
Minneapolis, the Valley in Taos, and along Colorado’s Front Range. They were a 2020 Rough Gems Curator at Union Hall in Denver and a 2019 NEST Grant recipient at CU Boulder, and their work was featured in UW Stout’s 2017 Journal of Student Research. Most recently, in the fall of 2021, Martin was awarded the New American Paintings Emerging Artist Grant, and they will be a featured artist in the Denver Art Museum’s 2022 Untitled series this June. Martin currently volunteers on the board of the newly formed Rural Midwest Artists Cooperative, is a program coordinator at Union Hall in Denver, and teaches in the Foundations Department at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.