Gabriel Martinez has, over the last 30 years, derived his projects from queer archives and subcultural erotic histories., For Expo 25 the artist reconceptualizes Sparks in a Dark Room , a significant installation Martinez presented in 2024 at Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M). Drawing parallels between Martinez’s art and life and queer Filipino, Chicago-based  artist Etienne, whose work forms the core of LA&M’s collection. Martinez’s freewheeling installation, images taped to the wall and tucked into bathrooms, have been reimagined for Expo Chicago in a more permanent forms.

Martinez approached the late artist as a maker of queer collective mythologies, as his technique uses contact printing, disco balls, and lasers to bring forth manifestations of leather dreams. Celebrating an expansive erotic  drive through the employment of his unique photo processes that uses a photographic tricksterism to render the archival images he rephotographs as magical, dark and sweet simultaneously and always hot.

Martinez raised in Miami but basing his entire career in Philadelphia, both as a beloved teacher of young artists and as one of the city’s foremost makers. Alongside visionaries like Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Wolfgang Tillmans, Martinez invites viewers to consider what was lost when the “golden age of promiscuity” ended during the AIDS crisis. Born in 1967, the artist was too young to have experienced the carefree sex depicted in his work. Still, as a gay man in his fifties, Martinez is figuratively revisiting this era with a mix of survivor’s guilt and erotic envy.