Scenes from Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s radical cuir world-building

In Convulsiones Planetarias/Planetary Convulsions (runs through August 2), Kadist showcases Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s marvelously otherworldly videos. While it may be the artist’s first U.S. solo exhibition, the Mexico City and Oaxaca-based artist’s work has been show internationally, at biennials, and locally in the series “Performance in Progress,” curated by Frank Smigel at SFMOMA in 2017.

Through the Kadist exhibition’s videos “Resiliencia Tlacuache/Opossum Resilience” (2019), “Soneto de Alimañas/Sonnet of Vermin” (2022), and “Filiación abono/Dung Kinship” (2024), Rincón Gallardo presents elaborate cosmologies that reference ancient Mesoamerican mythologies and ecological processes. With fabulous makeshift costumes and props, the artist builds worlds that prioritize queer/cuir and Latinx politics within the Oaxacan landscape.

In Rincón Gallardo’s surreal “Soneto de Alimañas/Sonnet of Vermin,” the artist tells the story of a fuchsia-winged bat with large pink ears and glowing green eyes. As the bat hangs from the ceiling of an underground archeological ruin, a Mayan gold mask broadcast radio signals. Children dressed in frog-like helmets with antennae and electronics receive the radio signals. Frogs, with their porous skin and delicate endocrine systems, are bioindicators of environmental pollution on land and water. Through Rincón Gallardo frog-child characters, the artist playfully advocates for vulnerable beings that can be adversely impacted by our poor stewardship of the environment.

The symbiotic relationship between animal species and the environment is also played out in “Filiación abono/Dung Kinship.” In Rincón Gallardo’s world, viewers meet a bicycle gang of flies dressed in black foam costumes with bulging faceted eyeballs, children dressed as fungi in psychedelic patterned mushroom cap hats (possibly a reference to psilocybin), and a scarab (symbolic of rebirth in Egyptian and Indigenous mythologies) that rolls an enormous dung ball across the ground.

As the mushrooms capture the fly in a colorful string net and the dung ball becomes a portal to a bike shop lair where flies appear to be forced to pedal stationary bikes, the work surreally addresses decay and rebirth. The lowly fly, dung beetle, and mushroom produce, distribute, and ingest waste, and Rincón Gallardo embraces the queerness of the dirty, base, and neglected, transforming ecological processes into cultural metaphors.

Throughout Rincón Gallardo’s work, the artist uses imaginative and funky straw and paper maché costumes peppered with simple electronics, mechanisms, and puppetry. The makeshift costumes speak to the phantasmagory within traditional Mesoamerican craft and mythology and the politics of camp and queer/cuir aesthetics, where verisimilitude is not necessarily the goal. As the surreal characters move between ruins, the landscape, a bicycle shop, and a bar, Rincón Gallardo infuses the carnivalesque into familiar and recognizable places to hold space for alternative realities.

Additionally, place and the politics of the local are centered in Rincón Gallardo’s use of the Oaxacan landscape, a site of colonial histories and archeological ruins and a Mexican biogeographic “Transition Zone,” where terrain, climate, and biodiversity merge. As Rincón Gallardo reclaims ancient motifs and mythologies, the artist also reconsiders the legacy of colonization and its impact on how we inhabit, steward, and participate in a larger cosmological and global culture.

In narrative and aesthetics, Rincón Gallardo is rooted in post-colonial thought, environmentalism, queer/cuir identification, and punk rock/cyberpunk, such that the DIY ethos is a radical world-building and conscience-raising enterprise. As Rincón Gallardo mashes up seemingly disparate motifs and approaches, the artist invites viewers to suspend belief and to be receptive to alternative realities.

CONVULSIONES PLANETARIAS/PLANETARY CONVULSIONS runs through August 2. Kadist, SF. More info here.