Sites of Encounter
GABRIEL MARTINEZ
Exhibition Dates:
June 26 - August 14, 2026
Opening Reception:
Friday, June 26, 2026, 5:00-9:00pm
Artist Talk:
Saturday, June 27, 2026, 11:00am-12:00pm
Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present Sites of Encounter, the gallery’s first exhibition with Philadelphia-based artist Gabriel Martinez. Including new photographic works of cruising spaces across the US, Martinez creates fragmented queer landscapes that are imbued with anticipation and memorial.
Of Cuban-American descent, Martinez was raised in Miami’s Little Havana in the 1970s - a period of massive cultural shifts, radical creativity, sexual liberation, and profound loss. He utilizes experimental dark room techniques, alongside both archival and personal images, to explore topics at the intersection of his Cuban and Queer identities. This has manifested in series that examine the AIDS crisis, Caridad del Cobre, the aesthetics of disco, Stonewall, and the legacies of migration and exile. The subject of AIDS, in particular, has remained central throughout his career, shaping an approach that resists erasure and honors the resilience of his communities.
Sites of Encounter marks a departure from Martinez’s past usage of images from national archives, to utilizing his own documentation of cruising spaces. Photographing sites in Fire Island, Miami, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the locations are specific to his own experiences, while also capturing well-known Queer playgrounds that date from the 1970s to present. The final works, documenting both interior and exterior spaces, are layered distortions of the original landscapes - inverted, solarized, and bathed in light from multiple mirror-ball exposures.
Over the last 20 years Martinez has utilized complex darkroom techniques to create these effects. Once an image is identified, he translates the photograph into a large-scale fragmented digital file. The digital fragments are then converted into paper negatives and contact printed onto silver gelatin paper. Utilizing various light sources such as prisms, disco balls, or laser lights, the prints are re-exposed, processed, inverted, and then assembled into the final work. This method allows for light to adorn, distort, or fuse with a landscape so that the final works become portals to a time, a place, or a sensation.
WORKS
Installation ImageS
coming soon…
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gabriel Martinez (b. 1967) is a photo-based multidisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in Miami, Florida. He was a Pew Fellowship in the Arts recipient in 2001, received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2003, and was recently awarded both a 2019 Independent Creative Production Grant from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation and a 2019 Independence Foundation Fellowship. He has participated in several artist residency programs including: the Rosenbach Museum, the Fabric Workshop, the Fountainhead Residency, Arcadia Summer Arts Program, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Banff Centre, the Studios at MASS MoCA and the Joan Mitchell Center. Martinez attended the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in 2003, and received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in 1991 and his BFA from the University of Florida in 1998. He has been teaching in the Photo Program for the Department of Fine Arts, PennDesign for the last 20 years. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for the Emerging Visual Artist, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and Galaei (a Queer LatinX social justice organization). His work is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop & Museum, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.