A brand new exhibition about “architectural extractivism” by photographer Onnis Luque is on view in Artwork Omi’s Newmark Gallery. DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visible Archive of Architectural Extractivism is curated by Artwork Omi senior structure curator Julia van den Hout.
Per an inventive assertion, the present is “each documentation and provocation—a visible archive that reclaims visibility for the landscapes structure is determined by” and that “asks us to confront the price of what we construct.”
DOMINIO is akin to Victor Kossakovsky’s new movie Architecton in that each prod crucial questions on structure and materials useful resource extraction. It options images by Luque of extraction websites in Mexico of the Mezquital Valley, the Highlands of Chiapas, Sierra de las Mitras, and the Yucatán Peninsula.
Luque’s foray into the mission started in 2014, when he started capturing fractured hillsides, gaping quarries, and “industrial wounds”—photos that oscillate between “magnificence and horror” of websites formed by machines but in addition ideology, i.e. capitalism, colonialism, and modernism.
The imagery conveys distant landscapes with restricted constructions, development crews shoveling away at partitions of rock, and the erosion of pure landscapes.
In Artwork Omi’s light-filled gallery house, a number of of Luque’s poignant photos are blown as much as span the complete size of the partitions they cling to. Different images have been printed on smaller canvases and are organized as collages within the exhibition house.
Accompanying the images are bodily examples of the supplies depicted within the imagery. As an illustration, a pile of small stones mimics the towering form of the mountain featured within the {photograph} that it’s staged in entrance of.
Within the heart of the gallery, a single stack of cinderblocks serves as a reminder of what the landscapes introduced in Luque’s work can develop into. “DOMINIO makes seen what architectural photos typically conceal: that buildings are rooted not solely in place, however within the distant voids left behind by their supplies,” the curatorial assertion reads.
“The exhibition questions pictures’s personal complicity in sustaining structure’s myths,” the assertion continues. “Can photos reclaim crucial floor? Can we reimagine architectural manufacturing past extraction? Can we inhabit the planet with out eroding the very programs that maintain life?”
Luque lives and works within the peninsular Mayan territory. After learning on the Faculty of Structure on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he went on to develop into an expert photographer.
Books of Luque’s embody Structure, State and Militarization (2023), UNDERCOVER (2021), and USF/DF Techniques of Appropriation (2014).
The exhibition is open by means of Might 31, 2026.
