OPENING & ARTIST RECEPTION | Saturday, December 2 | 5-7pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to announce Michelle Yi Martin: Off Grid, an exhibition of new and recent weavings, on view December 2, 2023 - January 27, 2024. This is the artist's second solo presentation with the gallery, featuring her hand-woven loom works. The title Off Grid encapsulates Yi Martin's process and introspection within her practice, as well as the implications of the expression "off the grid," which carries connotations of independence, sustainability, and an alternative to the conventional norm.
Off Grid is a collection of Yi Martin's pictorial, sculptural, and conceptual weavings that play with the process of moving threads through spaced parallel lines and also with our omnipresent desire for freedom and self-sufficiency. A textile, which is always created on a grid, has the amazing power of adaptability. It responds to the structured foundation by following established rules while still taking a path of its own, off grid. In Yi Martin's words, "Much like the human condition, we build on the bedrock of our past to help determine our present-future while simultaneously liberating ourselves from a system. We seek and thrive on a pliable plane."
Often symbolic of the natural world—bird, squid, cocoon, garden—Yi Martin's textiles hold narratives within their abstraction, akin to encoded observations and humanistic messages. Using horsehair and wood reeds, Icelandic hand-dyed wool and metallic thread, acrylic paint and direct sunlight, she crafts these unexpected materials in the two-dimensional plane on a floor loom. Then she shapes her woven work into varied structures: three-dimensional forms, monofilament sculptures, or held by raw Douglas fir.
Noteworthy is Yi Martin's technique of directly applying paint onto warp threads in select works. These threads serve as singular elements in the weaving grid, lending an interplay between abstraction and form that questions gaze and perception. Unlike the precision needed in weaving complex patterns, the painted warp will take its own direction while still conforming to the grid. Yi Martin consistently reimagines every aspect of her practice, encompassing her choice of materials, traditional processes, and the overall experiential dimension.
Her work acknowledges the significance of the grid as a place of origin and stability by sometimes quietly appearing as colorful abstractions, or in direct rebellion by slicing through spaces as wooden reeds. While some materials are literally resting on top of the woven grid, others are captured as perceptions from sunlight as a transcendent open grid. Yi Martin's hope is for viewers to hold and imagine the possibilities that present themselves in the here and now, a single point in the universal grid that weaves us together.
"As a Korean-American immigrant woman, I have always lived in the "in-between" space where the threads of one's identity converge. This intersection is a balancing act—and although never fully achieved, the act defines me. I simultaneously hold the past, the unknown, and collective dreams; and sometimes, I am lucky enough to translate them through my work.
My practice and choice of materials is an expression where conventional language fails. Fiber speaks to me because it holds deep wisdom from deep time. I wonder if my ancestors held horsehair, wool, ramie, and silk in their hands as I do, or if they also saw the face of the cosmos in their weavings. The past holds possibilities for now.
While my practice honors the ancient language of fiber, it also makes space for other mediums to join the conversation: light, performance, paint, ink, sound, and movement. Weaving these mediums is like decoding their capacity for storytelling, a self-perpetuating Rosetta Stone. Whether the work presents itself as amorphous beings held by delicate and nearly visible threads, or as layers of imagery made of woven sunlight, they exist because there is an in-between space where mystery resides."
Michelle Yi Martin (b. 1977, Seoul, South Korea) is a self-taught weaver based in San Francisco, California. Yi Martin has been an educator of the humanities, interdisciplinary art, and progressive education for over 20 years. She has developed an art practice in this intersection of history, human engagement, craft, experimentation, and fine art.
Yi Martin earned a BA in Classics from Santa Clara University, CA, and an MA from the University of San Francisco, where she became active in the Teaching for Excellence and Social Justice program. She completed residencies at Textilsetur in Blönduós, Iceland (2017); the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT (2019); and the Space Program in San Francisco (2020). As well, she received a grant from the Danish Arts Council to exhibit her work in Aarhus, Denmark (2019).
She has exhibited at the Copenhagen Contemporary in Copenhagen, Denmark (2023); Arion Press in San Francisco (2023); Ruth's Table in San Francisco (2023); the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco (2023); the Monterey Museum of Art, CA (2022); Municipal Bonds in San Francisco; Textile Center in Iceland; Ovartaci Museum in Denmark; Nationale in Portland, OR; Round Weather in Oakland, CA; the Berkeley Art Center, CA; Venetia Initiatives in New York, NY; and Grove Collective in London, UK. She participated as a contributing artist at Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC. Yi Martin's experimental "weaving of light" was featured as part of the Anni Albers exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT (2020), and the Copenhagen Light Festival (2022). Her work with the artist collective ESG was featured on the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as part of the Light Year installations (2021).
Additionally, she has been awarded commissions for permanent artwork installations by Meta Open Arts (2022) and San Francisco's newly developed Pier 70 (2024). In collaboration, Yi Martin was a finalist for the Biennale for Craft and Design prize in Copenhagen (2023). She is represented by Municipal Bonds.
