A new exhibition about “architectural extractivism” by photographer Onnis Luque is on view in Art Omi’s Newmark Gallery. DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visual Archive of Architectural Extractivism is curated by Art Omi senior architecture curator Julia van den Hout.
Per an artistic statement, the show is “both documentation and provocation—a visual archive that reclaims visibility for the landscapes architecture depends on” and that “asks us to confront the cost of what we build.”
The exhibition is sited in Art Omi’s Newmark Gallery. (Olympia Shannon)
DOMINIO is comparable to Victor Kossakovsky’s new film Architecton in that both prod critical questions about architecture and material resource extraction. It features photographs by Luque of extraction sites in Mexico of the Mezquital Valley, the Highlands of Chiapas, Sierra de las Mitras, and the Yucatán Peninsula.
The show centers sites of extraction in Mexico. (Olympia Shannon)
Luque’s foray into the project began in 2014, when he began capturing fractured hillsides, gaping quarries, and “industrial wounds”—images that oscillate between “beauty and horror” of sites shaped by machines but also ideology, i.e. capitalism, colonialism, and modernism.
The imagery conveys remote landscapes with limited structures, construction crews shoveling away at walls of rock, and the erosion of natural landscapes.
In Art Omi’s light-filled gallery space, several of Luque’s poignant images are blown up to span the full length of the walls they cling to. Other photographs were printed on smaller canvases and are arranged as collages in the exhibition space.
Luque began photographing the sites in 2014. (Onnis Luque)
Accompanying the photographs are physical examples of the materials depicted in the imagery. For instance, a pile of small stones mimics the towering shape of the mountain featured in the photograph that it is staged in front of.
In the center of the gallery, a single stack of cinderblocks serves as a reminder of what the landscapes presented in Luque’s work can become. “DOMINIO makes visible what architectural images often conceal: that buildings are rooted not only in place, but in the distant voids left behind by their materials,” the curatorial statement reads.
“The exhibition questions photography’s own complicity in sustaining architecture’s myths,” the statement continues. “Can images reclaim critical ground? Can we reimagine architectural production beyond extraction? Can we inhabit the planet without eroding the very systems that sustain life?”
Luque lives and works in the peninsular Mayan territory. After studying at the School of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, he went on to become a professional photographer.
(Onnis Luque)
Books of Luque’s include Architecture, State and Militarization (2023), UNDERCOVER (2021), and USF/DF Tactics of Appropriation (2014).
The exhibition is open through May 31, 2026.