A Conversation With… Martha Schnee
Her first solo show Reserved Channel now open till April 14th
Meet Martha Schnee, a multimedia artist and 1/4 of side body, a band and art collective based in Somerville, MA. Schnee’s first solo exhibit, Reserved Channel, is on show at the Distillery Gallery in South Boston and presents her explorative yet present style, expressed through prints, drawings, sounds, and performance.
The exhibit focuses on one of the areas of water Boston filled with land in the 1880s. Schnee invents a new species of fish that thrived before the waters were filled. She pushes viewers to engage their imagination while keeping them grounded with work made in the gallery’s physical space.
Schnee is in a low residency MFA program at Bard College while doing shows with side body, who recently announced they are playing Boston Calling in May. She received her undergrad from Bates College and an Art Education degree from Harvard, where she now teaches.
I had the chance to chat with Schnee and get to know her, the exhibit, and the balancing act of school, the band, and being an artist now.
Walsh: What does your schedule look like? What’s it like managing all the different parts of you?
Schnee: I joke it’s my Capricorn moon, but I don’t know. There are lots of to-do lists. Since I was out of college, I have had different part-time work that I was piecing together, and I find it’s nice for me to have multiple things going on at once; it just bolsters each part of the practice.
For example, we produced an album with my band last year, and I was able to submit that for part of my independent study in Painting/Printmaking.
Walsh: I’d love to hear a rundown of the exhibit.
Schnee: This was my first solo show. I got pushed to do this from my program because it was something I’d been afraid of doing. I love to work in collaboration and I find it one of the best ways to work, goofing off with friends will turn into an idea, stuff like that.
Even though it’s a solo show, it is 100% in collaboration, specifically with two of my best friends, Lena Warnke and Lucie March, who co-curated this show. I also worked with Shane Levi, the director of the Distillery Gallery, who is also a friend of mine. The show was more organic because we knew each other; it was like you could do whatever you wanted, which is one of the best things as an artist—and also a scary thing.
I started by doing site visits at the Distillery. I tried to get as specific as possible with what I found when I walked around, looked around, touched things, and asked questions. I’ve been developing my solo art practice using an experimental method: I rub places or objects on silk screen fabric and then print those rubbings onto paper.
It began with looking at memorials of my own family in Germany, Holocaust memorials. Then, it turned into this practice of memory and monuments, public education and monuments, and thinking about what story they tell. Can surfaces remember things? What is the ground? What kind of physical representation could I create of what a surface could remember? Then, folding that into printmaking formally, there’s a ground by which you print and a matrix by which you print. I can really nerd out about that for a while.
I began to ask myself what it could look like to make a monument to something that might not exist or to create something speculative that might be able to say something critical, silly, and joyful about it. I invented a species of fish to talk about all those things somehow. It’s also a place where I truly just went in a spiritual way or a physical way of daydreaming and allowing myself the pleasure of that daydreaming.
Walsh: How did you come to the title of Reserved Channel?
The core of the show was a few things I found in reading and researching around the edge of the Boston Harbor. There was a lot of Boston, but the specific area of Boston was one of the areas filled with land to create more factories. I was like, what if that didn’t happen? What are the conditions for that happening? It’s so based on colonialism, the triangle trade, specifically the slave trade and slavery, harmful industry, and climate destruction—every horrible intertwined thing. And at the same time, this is where people now live. This is an environment, and these are the conditions upon which we are on this land. And there has always been and will always be ecological and human resistance to the harm.
I started walking around this part of the harbor or the water near the gallery and learning about it. It was called the Reserved Channel. I learned that the Reserved Channel was where local organizers said, do not fill in all of the sea, please preserve part of it. So, the Reserved Channel is preserved as part of the harbor, which I thought was cool to honor local organizing in that way with the title of the show. But what also excited me was the word channel, for me it is a lot about radio or channeling, which connects back to an experimental sound artist named Maryanne Amacher I was researching. Amacher spent time at MIT in the ’70s and ’80s. In 1978, she found that the Boston Harbor resonated at F sharp. I was stuck on the fact that this person had locally found that the sound was like this particular tone. I imagined that those are the fish, and the specific tone comes from the fish.
Walsh: How are the tone and fish incorporated into your show?
Schnee: There’s a sound work in the show; it’s a 12-minute loop of me singing at an F sharp, but it’s the tuning fish singing. The audio is an underwater fish sound collage with my friend Emma Timbers playing cello at F Sharp. I’m playing a little bit of guitar in the audio. I also recorded parts of the building clicking in these crazy ways. I hoped to create this hallucinatory effect that was happening for me when I was like, is that the is that pipes, or is that the recording?
Then, my band side body performed at the opening, and my score for everybody was F sharp. That’s it. I was imagining what would have happened if the land wasn’t filled in, what it would have felt like to be there, and this sound allowed that connection for me to be made of bringing us conceptually underwater because that’s what the harbor sound was.
Walsh: How did you come into art?
Schnee: I’ve been thinking about this a lot. My parents met playing music, and I never thought I was a musician. It wasn’t what I liked. I asked to play drums in seventh grade, played for about three months, and quit.
But these last few years of my art practice have been very surprising to pick up instruments and relearn or teach myself with friends, which is how the band side body emerged. In lockdown, my friends Lena and Hava began playing, just doing a lot of intuitive action.
It’s like this is something that I didn’t know I needed to be doing, but I’m just doing it. I feel that way a lot about all of the art I make. It’s getting a message and figuring out what form it is coming through.
I wanted to be an inventor when I was really little, and recently, I’ve been realizing that’s what an artist is for me. In the show, there were also methods where I was like, “Can I make print this way?” For example, I resonated charcoal at F sharp and mono-printed it. I was just fully discovering.
Walsh: How does the current state of the world impact your art?
Schnee: I learned how to silkscreen as part of activism work during the first Trump era and early Black Lives Matter. I was living in Maine, and a roommate’s friend taught me in my living room how to screen print to make signs to hold at actions.
I was raised Jewish in a very Zionist-minded education system, around that time, in 2016, I started to ask a lot of questions. I began getting involved with organizing for Palestinian liberation, and still do that work, which has filled the last couple of years. I think that’s where my interest in education comes from: the power of education to tell certain dominant or hegemonic narratives and how that can shape people's world-view. How can we find ways out? How can the truth come to light?
I feel I’m in a unique position to speak out because it complicates the divides or narratives from the dominant powers. I’ve been working at Harvard on an Emerging Leaders program that trains young people to be involved in local community activism and social change projects in their communities.
Walsh: Is there anything else you would like to mention or discuss?
Schnee: I guess one last thing I’ll say is like on the other side of that, there’s also such a need for gathering and joy and catharsis, and I think that’s a lot of what the band can provide or these like silly moments of rupture. It’s a terrifying time. I feel like I’m even self-censoring because of fear of what to say, but there is so much from history to lean on. Many of my earlier work in print studied student movements and protests in 1968 and 1969. There’s beauty in learning or just reading from the past. If my work can have conversations or my shows can foster some joy in relationships, that’s ideal.
Reserved Channel has been extended to show until Monday, April 14th. Schnee and side body have lots more shows coming up, including a show in tandem with guitarist Cara’s book release, Sound On with WBUR, and finally Boston Calling on May 24th. For anyone in New York in July, Schnee will close out her MFA with a thesis show at the UBS Exhibition Center in the Hudson Valley on July 19th.
To stay updated, follow Schnee and the band on Instagram: @martha.schnee and @side.body
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