Heartthrob + Risolana
Exhibition and Along the Way Workshop
Hola,
Join me in celebrating my second solo show with Kouri + Corrao on November 7; 5-7PM at 3213 Calle Marie in Santa Fe.
Apolo Gomez | Heartthrob
November 7 - December 20, 2025
Reception: Friday, November 7 | 5-7PM
Kouri + Corrao | 3213 Calle Marie, Santa Fe
Heartthrob is an exhibition of intimate photographic works that confront the shame intertwined with desire. I use abstraction to think through queerness, desire, and the unstable spaces where bodies exist without needing to be fully disclosed. The work does not depict queer life directly; instead, it translates the architectures of objects and abstracts them into coded works of desire.
In Lightstroke, photographs of objects transform into alien landscapes: ridges, folds, and organic structures stretch across the frame, reading more like internal terrains. Interposing onto these surfaces are cylinders of color, teals, golds, blues, magentas, painted as smooth gradients of acrylic. In one piece, the cylinders form a cross that sutures and fractures the photographic ground. The added color cuts into and re-routes the landscape, creating a dynamic field where interiority and exteriority continually exchange roles.
Core brings this abstraction into direct relation with the body. In these smaller works, Polaroid emulsion lifts, fragile, skin-like membranes, are embedded within circular compositions. In one image, two queer bodies rest against each other, their limbs overlapping in a quiet gesture of intimacy. The emulsion sits inside a circular field of abstracted terrain, flanked by painted gradients. The tenderness of the bodies is held, framed, and interrupted by the harder edges of abstraction, creating a tension between exposure and protection.
Queerness in Heartthrob does not depend on explicit iconography; rather, it emerges through the work’s refusal to satisfy the demand for clarity, confession, or stable representation. In both series, forms collide: soft photographic terrains with hard-edged gradients, bodily emulsion lifts with photographic symmetries. These serve as allegories for queer social and erotic relations, how desire expands, contracts, folds, and refracts; how intimacy can be both vulnerable and fortified; how the body can be present without becoming a specimen for scrutiny.
In Ten Queer Theses of Abstraction, David J. Getsy views abstraction as a model resistance to the “trap” of visibility. This resonates deeply in this work. Queer lives are often interpreted first through compulsory legibility, through the gaze eager to classify, police, or prove. Heartthrob instead deploys opacity, camouflage, and code. It allows queerness to operate atmospherically rather than illustratively. Heartthrob uses abstraction to imagine queerness and desire as a structure that cannot be pinned down, a shifting and sometimes volatile architecture that holds the trace of the body without surrendering it.
My project Tracing Queer Chicanx Histories, which explores the overlooked narratives of queer Chicanx communities from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, was transformed into a risograph poster through a collaboration with the community print shop Risolana, where I also taught a workshop as part of their Along the Way program.
The poster revisited Albuquerque’s drag scene in the 1980s, drawing from the personal archives and lived experiences of Kenny Chavez, a member of The Honeybee’s, an influential drag girl group that brought joy and helped raised money for community members during the height of the AIDS epidemic. At a time when fear and stigma silenced so many, The Honeybee’s used performance, humor, and glamour as acts of survival and resistance.
Everyone who attended the workshop left with a print, a small gesture echoing that same spirit of generosity and connection. This collaboration reflects Risolana’s and my shared commitment to creative accessibility, community exchange, and honoring the histories that continue to shape queer life in New Mexico. Posters are limited and now available, half of the proceeds from the print support Risolana’s ongoing community programming.
Thank you for your support and following along.
XXX
Apolo