The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez: Positions

Rodriguez works in photography and film/video, often overlaying past and present to question the stability of visual narratives. A central thread in Positions is his engagement with photographic archives that complicate dominant representations of queer and Latinx histories. In 2020, while in Mexico City, he encountered a box of vernacular photographs documenting the life of an unidentified young, queer man. Since then, these images have become a recurring presence in his work, raising questions about authorship and the limits of photographic evidence. These inquiries unfold alongside images sourced from gay magazines, unnamed family albums, and Rodriguez’s personal photographs, creating compositions that combine intimacy and anonymity.

In Positions, images are placed in dialogue with one another, emphasizing how the camera and the materiality of the print create distance between viewers and subjects. Overlapping frames and compositions that obscure figures generate arrangements that defer recognition. Rodriguez’s recent works introduce sculptural elements that suspend photographs in space, resisting linear narratives and allowing meaning to emerge through proximity, juxtaposition, and the viewer’s own process of looking. These mobiles present photography as something simultaneously historical and performative, foregrounding its role in both preserving and reshaping personal and collective histories.

The exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Eduardo Andres Alfonso.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue, the artist's first museum publication, which will include an essay by the exhibition's curator, Eduardo Andres Alfonso.