Municipal Bonds is pleased to present 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.

Municipal Bonds