Sin Oro No Hay Triunfo: Adrián Gómez

Runs / November 6 - December 20, 2026

Opening Reception / Friday, November 6, 6-9 PM 

First Friday Reception / Friday, Dec 4, 6-9 PM

Hours: Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

For the final exhibition of 2026, Grizzly Grizzly presents Sin Oro No Hay Triunfo, an installation by interdisciplinary artist Adrián Gómez. A tangle of wires, screens, and forgotten trophies transforms the space into a livestreaming hub where objects come under interrogation. Armatures and stands allow CCTV cameras to crisscross and transmit images of gleaming trophies onto monitors across the room. These monitors that were once used to provide entertainment to incarcerated peoples now play host to an unending observation. Through the collision of objects, images, and histories, Gómez examines how meaning is constructed and authority reproduced through the rituals of looking and being seen. The exhibition considers how cultural narratives of power and belonging are constructed, circulated, and sustained through the symbols a society chooses to elevate.

As reclaimed trophies spin through ongoing revolutions, Gómez positions these objects and their static forms within new frames that transform and evoke past histories and landscapes through a contemporary lens. Here the installation breaks the boundaries between spectacle, surveillance, and confinement. The monitors used to replay these images being transparent themselves, can do little to conceal the mechanisms that make them tick. At the same time, tiny police officers are shown shooting vaqueros. These strange symbols of achievement, authority, and national identity are continuously re-cast and reproduced as they are forced into a seemingly never ending encounter. 

In another corner a basketball player is poised atop abstracted forms reflecting the elevation of athletic achievement into cultural notoriety. Where trophies are used to preserve and celebrate victory, surveillance mechanisms frame and re-frame, raising questions as to who is celebrated, who can be watched, and who holds the power to define triumph. Gómez’s work points to a thin line between existing either within or outside of the systems of power and domination.

As a Mexican Guatemalan American artist, Gómez interrogates the notion of an American identity and the unequal relationships of visibility, recognition, and control that sustain it. By unsettling the boundaries between heroism and aggression, achievement and domination, Sin Oro No Hay Triunfo reveals the violence embedded within the construction of national identity.

Brief Artist Bio

Adrián Gómez (b. 1994, Seattle, WA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines the complexities of cultural identity, memory, and being a first-generation American. Gomez earned his MFA in Ceramics from the University of South Florida and his BFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington. Previously having been a resident artist at Pottery Northwest (2020-2022), he is currently a long term Resident Artist at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia. He was also recently announced as the 2026-2027 Artist in Residence at the Latinx Projects at New York University (NYU). His work has been exhibited nationwide, most recently at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, and USF Contemporary Art Museum.