Luis De Jesus Los Angeles proudly celebrates Pride Month as a time for community, dialogue, and creative exchange. In this spirit, the gallery is pleased to present Strings Attached: Queering Proximities an intimate group exhibition exploring queer strategies through the works of multidisciplinary artists Amy Adler, John Brooks, Josh Cabello, Pui Tiffany Chow, Zackary Drucker, Rubén Esparza, Ken Gonzales-Day, Jonathan VanDyke, and Jwan Yosef. The exhibition is on view in the gallery’s project room from June 14 – July 19, 2025. Strings Attached: Queering Proximities celebrates the diverse perspectives of artists engaging in multidisciplinary queer strategies that expand on themes of relationality, empathy, intimacy, representation, subversion, and the queer sublime. The works on view exemplify intimate research practices that are deeply embedded both within and beyond their material forms—drawing connections from life, events, histories, popular imagery, and personal experiences. Spanning painting, drawing, photography, textiles, assemblage, and poetry, the exhibition invites us to consider how queer embodiments and affective ties—material and metaphorical—generate new frameworks for belonging, care, and resistance in a time of social fragmentation. About the Artists Amy Adler works across the disciplines of drawing, performance, photography, and film. Her practice explores media and processes considering subjects that exist between paradigms and identities. The study from Adler’s “Nice Girl” series examines the ubiquitous social media mirror selfie, exploring the complex social dynamics of how self-image is constructed, disseminated, and construed. John Brooks is a visual artist and poet who explores themes of identity, memory, death, and place while considering questions of contemplation, the expression of emotion, the transformative power and emotional resonance of particular experiences—and what Max Beckmann described as “the deepest feeling about the mystery of being." Josh Cabello focuses on creating queer sanctuaries. He paints lush, imagined gardens, conjuring a world where anyone who enters can be still, commune with oneself, and be engulfed by nature. Each piece serves as a portal for the viewer to explore the human interior. Pui Tiffany Chow uses pointed art historical references to examine the female form and the capacity for the canvas to stage them. Her work explores the intersection between abstraction and figuration, interrogates painting traditions in both subject and form, referencing Eastern and Western cultural codes and modes that coalesce into a pastiche of different tempos, feelings and approaches. Zackary Drucker is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. As a filmmaker in documentaries, television, and film, she has directed and produced several notable projects, including The Stroll, Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl, and Enigma, as well as her work on the HBO docuseries The Lady and the Dale and the Amazon original series Transparent. Rubén Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator. He effectively combines his insights from both roles to create intensely cross-referential physical and temporary works of art and exhibitions. His work explores Queer and Latinx histories, existential trauma, and the reconciliation of his heritage, examining the dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized within and in dialogue with the Western art canon. He has extensive studies in art, design, and art history. Ken Gonzales-Day’s interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded photographic projects consider the history of photography, the construction of race, and the limits of representational systems. His “Sharing Space” series of portraits contemplates visibility, presentation, and perception while celebrating the beauty and resilience of diverse creative communities in Los Angeles. Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist working at the intersection of painting and performance, with an emphasis on a queer, collaborative, and embodied practice. His sewn paintings emerge through complex and prolonged processes of accumulating, mark-making, and piecing from personal experiences. Jwan Yosef is a conceptual painter who deconstructs materials, language, and figuration. Through an examination of representational imagery—spanning personal and familial photographs, sports stills, and publicity images of public figures—Yosef exposes the evolving constructions of identity and belonging. ____ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Francisco Masó: Documentary Abstraction, the Cuban conceptual artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition runs June 14 through July 19, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 14 from 4–7 p.m. Francisco Masó: Documentary Abstraction brings together new works from Masó's ongoing series Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces. The series establishes a catalog and archive of acrylic on canvas paintings which serves as an abstract geometric guide for identifying the forces of power within a state control apparatus while simultaneously generating discourse on the militarization of Cuban civil society. The development of Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces started with Masó's search for information about protests against the Cuban government. Through his ongoing research of documentary photographs found on the dark web capturing scenes of repression in Cuba where political forces confront civil resistance groups, Masó has identified recurring linear color patterns in the clothing worn by the secret police. These garments are striped polo shirts imported by the Cuban government and distributed among various law enforcement institutions to their political officers as a work incentive. Their use is inconspicuous, creating a subtle yet unconscious distinction between those who wear them and those who do not. Masó replicates and reimagines these exact polo shirt patterns in paint, transforming their colors and stripes into recognizable symbols. Masó's paintings of textiles amplify records of a different pattern—a pattern of openly vigilant, oppressive behaviors—and effectively shifts the power dynamics through exposure and visibility of such patterns. Consequently, Masó's photo-investigative approach can be regarded as a form of counterintelligence. Documentary Abstraction contextualizes Masó's practice within the broader history of abstraction while highlighting through photography its intersection with political agency. The exhibition unfolds through a dynamic display across interconnected key moments, each offering a distinct entry point into the artist’s investigation of power, surveillance, and systemic violence. The paintings in Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces can be placed within a lineage of modern Latin American geometric abstraction and abstraction produced by 20th century artists such as Josef Albers, Blinky Palermo, Agnes Martin, and Rosemarie Trockel—artists who employ a critical lens to disrupt power dynamics. In the same way that Albers observes and studies colors, Masó examines photos made by bystanders and anti-government forces—records of political protest, of different gatherings and meetings—and perceives a certain repetition that stands out, even if it is barely perceptible in the visible field. Francisco Masó (b. 1988, Havana, Cuba) is an AfroLatinx artist living and working in Miami. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Stage Design from the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana (2014). He also graduated from both Behavior Art School (2009), led by Tania Bruguera, and the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts (2007). Recent solo exhibitions include Who Kills Ai Weiwei? at Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL (2022), and Where’s Your Favorite Place for Political Art at Home? at Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2021), and Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL (2020). Selected group exhibitions include Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency at The Wende Museum, Culver City, CA (2024-2025), Our Sway at Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL (2025), Movements Toward Freedom at MCA Denver, CO (2024), You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography at Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Sarasota, FL (2024), Paint the Protest at Off Paradise, New York, NY, organized by Nancy Spector, and Time for Change: Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection at El Espacio 23, Miami, FL (2019). He has participated in residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2024), the Hayama Artist Residency (2022), the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2022), and Artist in Residence in the Everglades (2022), and the Oolite Arts’ Home + Away Residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts (2020). Maso is a 2022 and 2020 Ellies Creator Award winner by Oolite Arts, a 2021 South Florida Cultural Consortium grant recipient, and a 2022 DV—AIRIE Award winner.