Robert Martin is a Wisconsin born artist with a MFA from the University of Colorado-boulder. Their work deconstructs rural America, often shown as a conservative, heteronormative, and masculine environment, by revisiting the space with queer themes and stories that often go overlooked. Martin uses wildlife as symbolism combined with vulnerable and intimate portraits to explore gender identities, binaries, the queerness of nature, and human understood queerness. The art is more driven toward conversation than critique and has stemmed from the artist’s very own exploration of their queerness and identity as nonbinary. Martin’s artistic practice utilizes the elements of storytelling and the aesthetics of catholic and other traditional arts to create a sense of familiarity but also tension. With their subjects, they lean into emphasizing shapes and values to bring out true presence. These compositions focus heavily on mood and character in their moment of intimacy or transformation which is only heightened by the surrounding but ever-changing natural landscape.