Vancouver's SUM gallery hosts Mexico City’s Salón Silicón’s Senos de Hombre, to March 25
The group exhibition explores queer identities, gender roles in Latin communities and beyond
Senos de Hombre curators Romeo Gómez López (left), Laos Salazar, and Olga Rodríguez of Salón Silicón. Photo by Jorge Gonzalez
SUM gallery in collaboration with Salón Silicón presents Senos de Hombre to March 25
VANCOUVER’S QUEER-MANDATED SUM gallery is presenting its first exhibition of 2023 in collaboration with fellow queer-led gallery Salón Silicón, based in Mexico City. Curated by Salón Silicón founders Olga Rodríguez, Romeo Gómez López, and Laos Salazar, Senos de Hombre explores how queer identities work to survive—and thrive—against an enduring backdrop of colonialism, Catholicism, and cultural machismo in Latin communities and beyond.
The group exhibit features photography and sculpture as well as an adult-orientated sex-toy workshop by several acclaimed Mexican artists, including López, Sandra Blow, Alan Hernández, and Karl Frías García.
Senos de Hombre (meaning “man tits”) takes its name from a deliberate misreading of a lyric in the Spanish song “Que Bello” by La Sonora Dinamita. The original lyric reads: “Qué bellos son tus celos de hombre/how beautiful your man’s jealousy is”. In an attempt to reject and redefine gender roles, Salón Silicón has adopted the humorous queering of this line by replacing the word celos with senos, the lyric becoming “how beautiful your man’s tits are”. With the swap, the song transforms from a praising of toxic masculinity to a declaration of non-binary body positivity, reflecting the overarching theme of the exhibition.
The group exhibit asks audiences to consider questions such as: How are body parts assigned gender? What makes a queer body?
Alan Hernández, Cresta de Gallo (2020).
Rodríguez, who has experience in the production and marketing of contemporary art, owns Salón Silicón, which is dedicated to promoting the work of women artists, queers, and members of the LGBTI+ community. She has worked at the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in Madrid and the Damián Ortega studio and workshop. López is a visual artist who, according to a release, “works with alternate and nightmarish worlds contained in dioramas, sex shows with puppets and toys, which represent a resistance to the expectation of compulsory heterosexuality with a personal vision that is nurtured by humour and a pornographic imagination”. Salazar is an independent artist and curator who works on queer subjectivity and the construction of homosexual masculinity.
One of the only permanent spaces worldwide dedicated to the presentation of queer art, the artist-run SUM gallery (425 - 268 Keefer Street) is the year-round programming arm of the Queer Arts Festival.
For more information, see SUM gallery.
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