A common mistake in navigating Boston’s cityscape is failing to distinguish between the artist-friendly South End and its far more industrial, traditionally blue-collar near-eponym, South Boston (colloquially known as “Southie”). The South End is the home of Boston Center for the Arts, for example, while South Boston stretches to include both the newly developing Seaport and a number of converted factories, one of which houses the Distillery Gallery, an artist-run gallery space in a converted warehouse. Most of Southie’s development in the postindustrial age has been a process of reconciling industrial vestiges and their character with repurposing uses of now-vacant space.
In the case of the Distillery, the factory was first constructed in the 1860s for the production of beer. The harbor “came right up to the property edge,” according to the Distillery North’s—a housing complex on the same property—blog. It did not become a rum distillery until the early 1900s, when it was purchased by a Newton family with roots in ale brewing. The family took up rum distilling after acquiring the factory, therefore connecting the space to the commercial legacy of the triangle trade. It remained a rum distillery into the late twentieth century, as the city began transforming waterways into usable ground through landfill—surrounding the factory with reclaimed terrain, except where commercial interests objected, giving rise to the Reserved Channel.
The Distillery sold its last barrel of rum in 1982 and was purchased in 1984, with all its industrial vestiges intact. An odd, vacant landmark in a “rough neighborhood,” according to the Distillery North’s blog, artists “gravitated” to the structure. In 2003 it was officially rezoned to become an artist live-work space to host a gallery and open studios. The Distillery is now home to many artists and offers revolving exhibitions open to the public throughout each year. Martha Schnee’s “Reserved Channel” is one such offering which uniquely centers a direct reference to the space and its history.
In “Reserved Channel,” Schnee imagines the site’s history before the insertion of land around it, transposing this act onto a species she invents called the “tuning fish.” Across the show’s works the fish becomes a recurring and grounding motif: a site for the work of superhuman empathy and a trans-temporal archaeology of the space. Schnee interrogates the space’s unique past and imagines for it new beginnings, endings, boundaries, and slippages. Her ambitious catalogue of objects spans charcoal rubbings, found object sculpture, pen works on lined notebook paper, a sound work, a poem, a guerilla installation, silk screens, and large-scale expressionist prints. Schnee exhibits in direct relationship to the space, highlighting the industrial vestiges across the gallery’s white box through object placement, artifacts, sound, print rubbings, indexes of material and touch—pushing the edges of the exhibition back toward the water.
Schnee first experimented with printmaking as a form of activism during her time in Portland, Maine, upon graduating from Bates College and receiving an honors BA in American cultural studies. She is now pursuing an MFA in painting at Bard while working as a teaching fellow in art, film, and visual studies at Harvard. From the dialogue between print activism and painting’s properties emerges one of the first works you encounter in the show, Screen for Boiler Room (where the water stayed water at the edge) (2025). The work is a silk screen byproduct of the printmaking process stretched across two of the space’s white industrial beams, partially mediating your view of the large expressionist print behind it—an anchoring piece that orients the show’s thesis titled Boiler Room Transmission II (where the water stayed water at the edge) (2025).
A close viewing of the two works, one directly in front of the other, nudges you to notice their rhyming colors and similar strokes and lines. The stretched silk screen becomes like a portal, taking on mediation as a part of its meaning. In looking at these two works together, a theme of translation and its layers emerges. Pursuing this theme leads you as a viewer to wonder if the big print is somehow a Platonic essential form or if perhaps it might be itself indexing something beyond it. The patterns of texture become evidence of surfaces beyond the gallery space in allusion to Schnee’s process and act of repurposing. From these works, the index (as a mark of presence or process) and the trace (a sign of what’s no longer there) as well as questions of position and positional relationships become crucial in grounding the rest of Schnee’s varying objects in the most essential questions of the show.
There are works like the silk screen sculpture stuffed into the corner of an offshoot room that, upon nearing, reveals an old glass bottle from the distillery that once was. In this room, a series of five small-scale charcoal bursts hang nonuniformly on unframed off-white paper, and black prints with organic white lines stretch the abstracted visual language of the large print and its corresponding silk into the domains of the offshoot. In another pocket off of the main space, a bright orange abstract work lays across two ceiling beams, facing the floor. Additional black and gray works line this room with objects of found sculpture tucked into crevices throughout. There is a zine authored by the artist that features a poem from the tuning fish’s perspective of being underwater and experiencing the sounds and byproducts of the distillery, as well as a continuously looping audio piece that vibrates the frequency that would have been heard under the water that has now been relegated to the Reserved Channel. Even more, Schnee has installed a “hidden” piece at the actual Reserved Channel formatted like a park’s service installation. Zip tied onto the channel’s fence, the piece poses as official signage of her species and features her illustrated fish motif.
Schnee uses her keen research eye and experience with mediums as activism, gateway, and message itself to codify indexes of information she has produced across her senses and across dimensions into the question of “What’s beyond the edge?” The show makes a strong case that beyond constructed, man-made, or otherwise artificial, boundaries, there is life; there is the species; there is the subjective experience; there is the body. In this show, the artist is using her body to physically and conceptually carve space out and refill it, producing a number of delightful moments that push the imagination toward empathy. Viewers are prompted to look up at works on the ceiling, through the silk screen toward the print it produced, around the screens bundled into corners for legibility, between bricks for found object sculptures Schnee has placed, and to sense—through an artificial species—the depth, color, sound, and feeling of the processes that have produced the institutions we naturalize.
During my visit to the show, the artist shared some thoughts about releasing absolute representation even in print, emphasizing the role of intuition in her process. For inspiration, Schnee cited Tomashi Jackson, known for her deeply researched multimedia works—particularly prints—that interrogate history, sensory experience, color, and what it means to inhabit your environment. Schnee worked closely with Jackson as a studio assistant and researcher for two years. She also points to Jack Whitten, a generationally African American abstract artist of the Birmingham-Bessemer School, whose large-scale, texturally abstract works reflect an intuitive process that pursues process itself as a site of inquiry. Intuition produces works that turn the act of viewing, as Schnee reflected, into a sort of cloud watching: identifying shapes and imagining what they have been or could be, allowing what the viewer sees to say as much about them as the forms do the artist. This ephemeral empathy—necessary in encounters with both abstraction and invention—allows viewers to join Schnee in her imagining of alternative worlds with different inhabitants and different modes of inhabiting.
For all this intuition, embodiment, and imagination, Schnee mentioned to me that the show began when she first walked through the space and asked what was behind its white boiler room door. Naturally, I asked the question back to her, and she took me into the boiler room which has largely remained intact since the Distillery’s construction. I heard phantom sounds; I saw molasses stuck to the walls, and tools, labels, imprints, and machines of a distant, almost fantastical age. It was in this dark, brown room that I began to reflect on the necessary catenation of this site of northern industry to the vestiges of chattel slavery. But instead of sensationalizing this narrative or leaning on its devastating weight, Schnee’s story unfolds much more slowly. “Reserved Channel” distills heavy legacies into playful creation that activates sensory awareness and engages the historically liberatory mechanism of intuition, so that viewers might grasp Schnee’s complicated entanglement of the past and the future without getting lost in the channel’s depth.
“Reserved Channel” is on view through April 12, 2025, at Distillery Gallery, 516 East 2nd Street, South Boston.
