Luke Godinez's multidisciplinary practice, spanning cyanotype, plaster sculpture, photography, and performance; constructs a visual lexicon of queer Chicano identity rooted in both personal intimacy and collective memory. Working across media, Godinez stages his own image within iconic poses historically reserved for white or feminine bodies, queering the canon and re-inscribing himself into narratives that have long excluded people like him. The work is not merely representational, it's ritualistic, elegiac, and defiantly joyful.

In his large-scale cyanotypes, Godinez reclaims the gaze. Printed in deep Prussian blues, his staged self-portraits evoke the devotional qualities of religious iconography, echoing the ghostly beauty of both memory and myth. These prints are supported, both literally and symbolically, by delicately cast plaster hands, painted pink and dusted with silver glitter. They stretch outward in reverence and care, as if cradling the image of a saint. These hands are not just props; they are poetic gestures of upliftment, adorned and adorned-with. Their lightness and shimmer contrast sharply with the weight of history embedded in the photographs.

Surrounding this core of visual work are sculptural pieces that draw on both Mexican cultural forms and queer aesthetics; piñata-like structures made of wrapping paper, for example, suggest both festivity and fragility. These ephemeral materials carry immense symbolic weight, conjuring childhood, ritual, and celebration. Their delicacy underscores the tension in Godinez's practice: the interplay of permanence and collapse, pride and vulnerability.

But it is through performance that Godinez most fully activates his world. In one recent work, he entered a room from behind the audience; masked, sequined, and radiant. He wore a shimmering handmade gown in a pinkish-purple hue, a plaster mask with hues of blue and violet, and a styled wig. With Diana Ross's "The Boss" playing, he lip-synced and moved through the crowd, transforming the space from quiet gallery to communal celebration. The effect was electrifying. The room, once hushed, erupted into song and laughter. The audience didn't just witness the work, they joined it.

This moment of transformation wasn't simply entertainment; it was liberation through glamour. It echoed the logic of drag, of pageantry, of Chicanx street performance, but elevated those practices into a sacred register. The artist, shimmering and present, collapsed the boundary between the performer and the viewer. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes:

"I will have my serpent's tongue — my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence."

Godinez's work overcomes that silence with glitter, with joy, with scale and song. And yet, embedded in the exuberance is a profound invitation to reflect: What do we see when we see someone who chooses to be fully seen?

His practice moves through lineage; tracing the histories of Chicano art, queer resistance, working-class identity, and West Coast performance, but it also creates something new. One thinks of the devotional use of color and body in the work of Ana Mendieta, or the drag-adjacent pageantry of Nao Bustamante and Martine Gutierrez. But Godinez's work is not imitation; rather, it expands on this lineage, inserting his particular histories as a Chicano queer man from Los Angeles into the visual field. It builds a speculative, radiant world in which queer brown bodies are not only centered, but exalted. A world where the ephemeral becomes monumental. Where the performer is a prophet. Where art is not just an object or gesture, but a shared spell.

Godinez's ability to conjure such space, both in the physical and spiritual sense, is what makes his work so vital. It does not flatten identity or offer palatable narratives for consumption. Instead, it sings in code, layers, glitter, and gesture. It holds its secrets while extending its arms. It's both mirror and portal, both truth and dream.

This is not performance for approval. This is performance as power.