Obsesión! Labor as Pleasure examines the work of seven US-based Latinx artists working across media as they engage, reimagine, and transgress notions of labor and pleasure. Including works by Justin Favela, Daniela Gomez Paz, Juan Hinojosa, Jessica Lagunas, Maria Yolanda Liebana, Gloria Martinez-Granados, and Lina Puerta, the exhibition highlights the vital role of pleasure in shaping and sustaining notions of labor, while offering a space for contemplation and transformation.

Through practices often associated with domesticity and immigrant labor—such as hand-stitching, embroidery, and embellishment—these artists transform their materials into meditations on identity, migration, feminism, environmentalism, and cultural memory. For them, labor is not only a physical act but a space of contemplation and resistance. Echoing adrienne maree brown’s concept of “pleasure activism,” the exhibition asserts that pleasure is not a luxury but a necessity for survival—especially for marginalized communities. Pleasure becomes both the outcome and the method of creation, offering joy as a mode of critique, protest, and re-imagination.

Justin Favela transforms colorful tissue paper—a humble and culturally significant material for piñata¹-making—into impressionistic scenes anchored in art history, pop culture, and personal history. Often replicating existing paintings—such as reinterpreting Frida Kahlo’s 1951 Still Life with Parrot and Fruit in his 2024 work Untitled (Still Life with Parrot and Fruit), After Frida Kahlo—Favela filters iconographic works through his labor-intensive technique of layering cut tissue in the tradition of the piñata. His work exposes the performativity of identity and questions whose narratives are preserved or erased within dominant canons. Closely associated with Mexico and broader Latin America, the piñata becomes a metaphor: festive, fragile, and historically loaded—linking colonial legacies to contemporary Latinx marginalization and resilience. Every strip of layered paper becomes a gesture of solidarity, transforming the political into a pleasurable act that invites viewers to confront the complexities of representation.

Daniela Gomez Paz explores fiber as an evolving landscape of memory and meaning. Working with felted wool, yarn, embroidery, painting, and found objects, she creates works that are both portals and familiar terrains. In Centro en quemas, Red’s center, 2024, the artist builds a nest-like structure of tightly coiled yarn embraced by the soft haze of felted wool, reminiscent of a spider’s laborious yet delicate silk webbing. The blurred edges achieved through the use of repetitive felting suggest the slow, continuous process of becoming. While vivid in its red color, it is an object in quiet transformation. The softness of the wool holds tension, as if the piece is breathing. In this meditative labor, Gomez Paz locates a subtle but profound pleasure—one that emerges from care, slowness, and the physical intimacy of making. Her work reminds us that transformation is often quiet, and that in the patient handling of materials, pleasure becomes a way to navigate personal and collective histories.

Juan Hinojosa uses found objects and printed media to construct assembled paintings and sculptures, recontextualizing their former lives. In HOT LUNCH JAM, 2025, Hinojosa appropriates a wheat pasted Bushwick advertisement and layers segments of a floral-patterned fabric his mother kept, found paper with images of unicorns, cartoons of birds, and 3D floral jewelry embellishments. These discarded items are coded with stories of growing up a queer Latinx child in NYC, filled with desire for luxury, beauty, and belonging in a world obsessed with class and pleasure. The labor and scope of Hinojosa’s practice of collecting, organizing and reassigning detritus is cleverly revealed in his assemblages of curiosity, frozen in time but bursting with energy.

Jessica Lagunas navigates the corridors of colonial history and indigenous legacies by incorporating found materials from nature, like feathers, onto textiles. She channels ancestral memory through the time-consuming process of gathering, cleaning and archiving feathers, hand-embroidering each one with French knots onto the silk organza, and hand-making yards of fringe from embroidery floss—a labor of over 60 hours. The mantones de Manila, which Lagunas researched during a fellowship at The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in 2021-22, were large embroidered silk shawls originally produced in China in the 19th and 20th centuries for Spanish and Latin American markets. Lagunas’ work Mantón de plumas (Feathered Shawl), 2022-24, reimagines the mantón through feathers—a material both ephemeral and resilient, and honors indigenous practices while subverting colonial luxury. Her time-intensive labor becomes an act of devotion, transforming an object once rooted in commerce into a vessel of reclamation. In this piece, pleasure resides not in spectacle, but in the intimate and meditative process of making.

Maria Yolanda Liebana’s material labor in which she meticulously applies embellishments, layering beads, mirror tiles, glitter, wallpaper and paint to compose larger paintings, invites viewers into the hyper feminine worlds of power, excess and kitsch. Her work, The Sacred is Not Silent, 2024, invites desire, lust and joy and asserts the sacred feminine as rebellious. Set within a lush garden of flowers made of collaged images and piped acrylic paint, Liebana’s figure refuses categories of gender and race through the use of found wallpaper collaged as skin, inviting viewers to consider the fluidity of identity as both constructed and adorned. Liebana transforms surface into site—locating pleasure as an act of care and affirmation. Her process challenges hierarchies of value in both art and culture, reimagining the feminine not as restraint, but as a space of abundance, power, and possibility.

Gloria Martinez-Granados constructs ghostly portraits that speak to the hidden labor of Latinx migrant food workers and the complexities of her own experience growing up undocumented, now a DACA recipient, using fruit packaging and embroidery thread. Her precise, meditative stitchwork transforms disposable materials into vessels of care and protest, where memory, mourning, and dignity converge, like in her work Retrato de Francisco, 2025. By centering practices rooted in meditative and complex repetition Martinez-Granados embraces labor not as a burden, but as an intimate language of resistance. Embroidery becomes a quiet yet potent form of pleasure activism—where each thread asserts presence and tenderness.

Lina Puerta’s multimedia works create an overall abstraction that dizzies the eye towards ecstasy by meticulously combining found objects, textiles, pigmented paper pulp and paint. Engaging time-consuming processes traditionally assigned to domestic labor, and championed by women, Puerta elevates humble and often discarded materials. She spotlights historically invisibilized Latinx and Indigenous labor, its ties to migration and the future of our planet under climate catastrophe. In Tomatoes and I (Black), 2020, from her Kinship Series, Puerta combines materials to create a tangled abstraction where her hands, patterns and the form of a tomato plant become one. This layering together with her use of psychedelic colors and embellishments suggest a solidarity with nature that reveals embodied wisdom and pleasure.

Obsesión! Labor as Pleasure offers a tactile encounter with labor not as burden, but as devotion. Across practices rooted in repetition, touch, and time, these artists embrace pleasure as a strategy for remembering, resisting, and reimagining. In their hands, obsession becomes a portal—where the act of making is inseparable from the joy of becoming. As adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism, “Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.” ² Through this lens, the labor of these artists is not only an aesthetic gesture, but a radical, embodied commitment to joy as justice.

Open Call Exhibition
© apexart 2025

1. The piñata is associated with celebrations in Mexico and Latin America. It originated in China and was brought to Europe before being adapted in Mexico as part of Catholic traditions. Traditionally made of clay and later of papier-mâché, it is filled with treats and broken open during festivities. The piñata has become a potent cultural symbol—representing themes of community, joy, and struggle.
2. adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 13.