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Sand, stone, and earth are among the most extracted materials on the planet—yet their removal is rarely pictured, let alone understood as foundational to the built environment. In the exhibition DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visual Archive of Architectural Extractivism, on view in the Newmark Gallery at Art Omi from March 21–May 31, 2026, architectural photographer Onnis Luque traces these often-invisible origins of construction back to the raw landscapes from which they are born.
What began in 2014 as a roadside encounter with a sand mine evolved into a years-long investigation of Mexico’s extractive geographies—from the Mezquital Valley to the Highlands of Chiapas, the Sierra de las Mitras to the Yucatán Peninsula. Through his lens, Luque captures the aftermath of relentless extraction: fractured hillsides, gaping quarries, and industrial scars etched into the land.
These photographs challenge the dominant visual culture of architecture, which glorifies pristine forms while obscuring the socio-ecological violence embedded in their production. They reveal a terrain shaped not just by machines, but by ideologies: capitalism, modernism, colonialism, and the myth of nature as inexhaustible resource.
DOMINIO makes visible what architectural images often conceal: that buildings are rooted not only in place, but in the distant voids left behind by their materials. The exhibition questions photography’s own complicity in sustaining architecture’s myths. Can images reclaim critical ground? Can we reimagine architectural production beyond extraction? Can we inhabit the planet without eroding the very systems that sustain life?
DOMINIO is both documentation and provocation—a visual archive that reclaims visibility for the landscapes architecture depends on—and asks us to confront the cost of what we build.
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DOMINIO opens in the Newmark Gallery at Art Omi on Saturday, March 21 from 1–3 PM. The opening is free and open to the public. RSVP essential.
Onnis Luque | DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visual Archive of Architectural Extractivism is curated by Julia van den Hout, Senior Architecture Curator.
ABOUT ONNIS LUQUE
Onnis Luque is a Mexican architectural photographer and trained as an architect. He graduated from the School of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and embraced photography as the medium that most strongly resonates with his commitment to critically investigate architectural production, modes of dwelling, landscape, and territory.
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His work unfolds through a rigorous visual inquiry into the socio-ecological forces that shape built environments and human experience under modern capitalism. Luque’s research-driven practice navigates the intersections of space, power, and representation, articulating complex relationships between bodies, places, and systems of economic and cultural mediation. He is the author of DOMINIO (Gatonegro, 2023), (H) Architecture, State and Militarization (Self-published, 2023), UNDERCOVER (The Velvet Cell, 2021), and USF/DF Tactics of Appropriation (CONACULTA, 2014). Luque currently lives and works in the peninsular Mayan territory.
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ART OMI
Art Omi is a not-for-profit arts center in New York’s Hudson Valley that is home to the 120-acre Sculpture & Architecture Park and Newmark Gallery, international residency programs, and thriving arts education programs. Art Omi forms community with creative expression as its common denominator for artists and the public alike to celebrate the transformative quality of art.
ART OMI: EXHIBITIONS is a laboratory for artists and architects to challenge conventions, take risks, and shape urgent cultural conversations. We champion artists and architects at critical moments of their careers, offering a platform to test new ideas. Through exhibitions, events, and publications, we foster projects where playful irreverence meets critical inquiry. Our program is designed to build community and provoke dialogue, self-reflection, and experimentation. We serve as an open invitation to all.
ART OMI: RESIDENCIES offers five discipline-specific residency programs for international architects, artists, dancers, musicians, and translators and writers. Since our founding in 1992, we’ve hosted more than 2,400 residents from over 114 countries. We invite the public to engage with our talented residents at free events throughout the year.
ART OMI: EDUCATION engages people of all ages with contemporary art and ideas in a stimulating and dynamic environment through programs including camps and weekly workshops. Through creative exploration, experiential learning and making, collaboration, and critical thinking, our arts education programs—beloved by local families and children and praised by educators for their pedagogical innovation—instill understanding, appreciation, and lifelong curiosity in the arts.
Free to all, Art Omi is open year-round. Follow Art Omi on Instagram, Facebook, and on artomi.org.
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Old Fashioned Hospitality
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