Dominique Muñoz: Myth in Patterns
January 14, 2027 – February 17, 2027
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 14, 2027 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Artist Talk: Thursday, January 14, 2027, 5 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building Room 2033
From birth, fabric cradles us—soft, worn, and imbued with care, a second skin that shields us from the world. In the exhibition, Myth in Patterns, Dominique Muñoz treats blankets and textiles in his photography-based practice not just as materials but as vessels of memory carried across generations, borders, and homes. Drawing from his Guatemalan heritage, Muñoz subverts the conventions of portraiture, challenging both the colonial and heteronormative histories of the medium.
In collaboration with his family, he constructs highly staged images within his studio and childhood homes, arranging blankets and their patterns in mesmerizing layers – queering the domestic space. These environments raise questions about traditional gendered expectations, becoming sites of fluidity and play. Cared for by the matriarchs in his family, these fabrics hold the weight of cultural identity. The vibrant motifs embed Mesoamerican mythologies as a form of knowledge, preserving and remixing traditional Guatemalan symbols and patterns. Photographic tools—C-stands, spring clamps—are left visible, exposing the mechanics of image-making, blurring the lines between authenticity and artifice. Mirrors, positioned behind the hand-cut silhouettes, shift the viewer’s perspective, revealing the textiles draped just beyond the camera’s gaze. These silhouettes punctuate his compositions allowing new patterns to emerge, echoing the fabrics that have shaped him. Muñoz embraces excess, not as something to be tamed but as a mode of joyful resistance. These aesthetic choices are not merely decorative; they assert the value of cultural expressions often dismissed as ‘tacky’ or excessive.
A wooden pallet, balanced precariously within the installation, echoes the instability of imposed structures—the rigid frameworks individuals are expected to navigate. It becomes a site of both constraint and possibility, mirroring the tensions of migration, identity formation, and gender roles. The peacock feathers serves as a symbol of beauty and masculinity while referencing a journey navigating traditional expectations. Scattered around the gallery space are handwoven baskets using alternative photographic process called cyanotype to reweave the patterns into new objects that hold audio files of his grandmothers voice.
Myth in Patterns examines how histories of care and migration shape identity, ultimately questioning how we continue to remake home in ever-changing landscapes.
Biography
Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan-American visual artist working in photography, printmaking, and installation. His practice examines how cultural traditions adapt, fracture, and persist through migration, reweaving pattern and light as collaborators in that inquiry. He considers how assimilation, queerness, and cultural survival entangle, using visibility as a conceptual framework to challenge photography's colonial and heteronormative histories.
Dominique earned his MFA in Studio Art from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025 and his BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. He currently is a fellow with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He was named the 2025 Denis Roussel Fellow at the Center for Fine Art Photography and has attended residencies at Storm King Art Center, ACRE Projects, and Ox-Bow School of Art as a LeRoy Neiman Fellow. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including Provincetown Arts Association Museum (Provincetown, MA), The Greenville Museum of Art (Greenville, NC), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), The National Building Museum (Washington, DC), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Lump Gallery (Raleigh, NC)
Between The Smoke and the Mist: Sigfrido Koch Bengoechea
February 25, 2027 – March 24, 2027
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 25, 2027 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Curator Talk by Professor Emeritus Lee Fontanella: Thursday, February 25, 2027 4:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. in Cultural Arts Building, Room 2033
Sigfrido Koch Bengoechea (1908-1973) was a superb portraitist and pictorialist photographer of the Basque Country and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The present exhibit is the first showing outside of Spain where San Telmo Museoa, Donostia/San Sebastián exhibited it in 2021. In seeming contradiction two types of photography are on display: one tending toward documentary (ravages of war), the other toward pictorialism (the more bucolic images).
Koch’s civil war photographs expressed brutal views of the ravages of the Spanish war, specifically on the fronts of Gipuzkoa, Vizkaia, Santander, Oviedo, Madrid, and the Ebro. After the war, Koch found solace in photographing the human types of the Spanish Basque Country and their expression of self as reflected in work, play, dress, sports, etc.
The personal album from which these images derive demonstrates the relation that Koch saw between his documentary views and other images of death and torture and those of experimental human physical repair, in other Spanish locales and other corners of the world.
This vantage point, somewhat removed, may prompt an impression of certain mental reflection on the effects of war. This “indecision” about the moral aspect of war and the glory that some derived from it is evident in this exhibit. We find a discrepancy between humane preoccupation and the sleek efficacy of military equipment and bellicose exploits.
Koch’s work raises the issue of whether art comes during or derives from consummate inhumanity. The nostalgic images of the countryside may suggest that eventually art can. Thus, his shocking documentary of a paradise lost yields somewhat to the more creative vision of a paradise regained in a sense. Condemnable destruction yields to restorative permanence through photography in the heartfelt, experiential, deep-seated values of his own youth in the Basque Country.
How could one not conclude the tortured soul of the photographer, given such anomalies? Photography, here, may be understood to have some restorative potential, even while it sets before us the unforgiveable horror of war.
This exhibition was made possible by a collaboration between the UNCW Art & Art History Department, the UNCW History Department, Professor Emeritus
Spring 2027 Senior Exhibition
April 8, 2027 – May 7, 2027
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 8, 2027 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Senior Exhibition is a capstone requirement for all UNCW seniors graduating with a major in Studio Art.
2027 Studio Art Faculty Biennial
May 31, 2027 – September 3, 2027
Closing Reception: Thursday, September 2, 2027 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
2027 Studio Art Faculty Biennial will features current work in a diverse range of media explored by University of North Carolina Wilmington’s studio art faculty members.
