QUEUE Gallery is pleased to present Un Gran Amor por La Bomba, a solo exhibition by Q represented artist David Correa, opening February 4th in Mexico City.
Stemming from an ongoing inquiry into anthropology, weaponry, and labor, Correa’s work examines these systems as parallel mechanisms of extraction, each producing a “perfected” body through displacement, study, and instrumentalization. At the center of the exhibition, Un Gran Amor por La Bomba, is the bomb, not only as a weapon but as a man-made god: a thermonuclear sun engineered to replicate divine power, efficiency, and inevitability. Like anthropology, which has a tendency to replace lived bodies with purified surrogates, the bomb becomes a perfected abstraction for external consumption—created by man, ritualized through testing, and rendered sacred through its functionality.
Correa draws a critical parallel between the bomb and the immigrant laborer, both produced by American systems as ideal tools, valued only through function and productivity. The immigrant body is perfected through labor just as the bomb is perfected through repetition and refinement; in both cases, obsolescence is equivalent to erasure. Within this framework, rebellion becomes the final form of agency. The bomb rebels actively through detonation—an implosive suicide—while the immigrant body resists passively through refusal, exhaustion, or nonperformance. Both acts lead to nonfunctionality, exposing a system in which perfection and disposability are inseparable.
At the symbolic center of the exhibition is Bluegill Prime, a failed U.S. nuclear test that detonated prematurely before it was meant to. Correa interprets this malfunction as an act of protest: a man-made god that kills itself before fulfilling its purpose. Within the live performance, the bomb is embodied as a character who becomes the exhibition’s spiritual core, a divinity that refuses its own existence through implosion and nonfunctionality. Central to the exhibition is the figure of the American Cowboy, a mythic agent of Manifest Destiny and masculine conquest. Here, the Cowboy is both creator and witness: architect of the bomb and anthropologist of its remains. Through acts of iconography and documentation, failure is sanctified and protest is transformed into an archival monument. In rendering the bomb’s image, God is replaced—not with salvation, but with a perfected object designed to kill and die repeatedly.
Un Gran Amor por La Bomba situates the human body within a post-human logic of efficiency and expendability, aligning thermonuclear physics with migrant labor and visual theology. What remains is not transcendence, but repetition: a god engineered to destroy itself, and bodies designed to function until they no longer can.
David Correa (b. 1999, Miami, FL) is a contemporary artist based in Miami. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and works across disciplines to construct narrative-driven installations and performances. His practice explores existentialism and post-humanism, examining the human body as a system subject to modification and control. Correa is represented by QUEUE Gallery and has presented work with Voloshyn, Primary, the Miami Design District, and Untitled Art Fairs, is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is currently in residence at Tunnel Projects.
