March 28, 2025 – June 29, 2025
Vladem Contemporary
Montezuma Ave.
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Departures that Brought Us Here merges research in LGBTQ+ archives with the kinetic movement of a split-flap display board.Traditionally used in airports and train stations to signal movement and transition, Gomez has transformed the display board into a storytelling platform containing messages, memories, and resistance from the LGBTQ+ community. Shifting letters combine with archival ephemera, echoing the fluctuating, fleeting nature of queer histories, highlighting the precarity of queer existence.

December 04, 2024
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM

New Mexico Museum of Art
Plaza Building
107 West Palace Avenue
Santa Fe, New Mexico

New Mexico is known for its rich photographic history and has a thriving contemporary photographic community. With the generous support of the Chicago Woodman Foundation, The New Mexico Museum of Art has paired select emerging photographers with Gallup Arts and  the University of New Mexico- Gallup, San Juan College, and New Mexico State University for “Master Class” sessions. In these visits the photographers have shared their work with current students and community members and shared their observations about what it takes to make a career in photography.

I'm pleased to announce that I am a receipt of the 2024 Fulcrum Fund for my project Tracing Queer Chicano and Gay Rights Movements Through Art. This Zine project explores the interconnected narratives of the Chicano Queer and Gay Rights Movements during the 1970s and the 1980s. The project seeks to contextualize these movements within their socio-political landscapes. Connecting the threads through interviews, and photographs of New Mexico queer activists and survivors of the epidemic

Apolo Gomez’s Exodus follows its own rules—where the everyday and something stranger exist in seamless cohabitation. This ongoing Polaroid series, begun in 2021, largely features portraits of friends, lovers, and acquaintances stretched over beds, in full-body latex, in repose, or reaching for something just out of frame. In their tenderness and daring intimacy, they are a mirror. In every image bleached with flash, sculpted by shadow, or multiplied like a kaleidoscope, there is an honesty that is both familiar and rare.

I am beyond honored that Francisco J. Galarte wrote about his experience of being photographed by me for Viscose Journal Vol. 4 TRANS. This special issue of Viscose critically explores the numerous relationships between transness and fashion. The issue sets out to ask two ambivalent questions: what is a fashion theory of transness, and what might a trans theory of fashion be? Viscose 04 productively confronts fashion studies with trans aesthetics and trans studies, and attempts to excavate the largely invisible archives of trans history that form the underside of fashion itself.

The issue features a wealth of archival and contemporary moments of trans-fashion production spanning 50 years.