Rodrigo Valenzuela : Afterwork

Valenzuela’s contemporary Frankensteinian contraptions are ominous, uncanny, and have a sinister edge, embodied by the threat of metal chains and hefty hooks. But they are also by turns delicate, and almost sympathetic. By allowing the recognition of some of its parts—such as the spidery legs of a repurposed umbrella—the artist offers a glimpse of his ingenious process of reuse. Photography, the medium so attached to reality, is here put the task of world-creation, generating a vision of afterlives where capitalism might be combatted with imagination.

These images are both in and out of time. They suggest the roaring steel mills of the past, quickly abandoned once outdated. They also offer a retrofuturistic vision, the look of former potential futures in which workers and machines came up with a better plan than their mutually assured futility. But as stand-ins for the growing numbers of workers dispossessed due to automation, they also conjure a more disconsolate view of the future. In their invocation of histories of labor, and of industries created by humans in order to displace themselves in the service of capital, these photographs intersect with the struggles for unionization, a longtime interest for Valenzuela. They invoke the body’s worth—both single and collective—as well as that of rest and pleasure.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b.1982, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Valenzuela completed an art history degree at the University of Chile (2004), then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Evergreen State College and an MFA at University of Washington (2012). He is a Professor of Art at University of California Los Angeles.

Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela's photography, video and installation work is rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, at the same time, these pursuits are equally centered on a semiotic, politically engaged post-capitalist critique of social constructs and civic institutions.

His most recent solo exhibitions include Stature, Aysa Geisberg Gallery, New York (2020); Journeyman,  Klowden Mann, Culver City, CA (2020); Jornada, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA (2019), Photography: Beyond the Surface, Musuem of Art and History, Lancaster, CA (2019), Past I Present, Upfor, Portland, OR (2019), Screen Series: Rodrio Valenzuela, New Museum, NY (2019), American Type, Laurence Miller Gallery, NY (2019) MASA, Arroniz Arte Contemporeano, Mexico City, Mexico (2019), The Return of the Real, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL (with Robert Lazzarini) (2019), American Type, Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery, Light Work, Syracuse, NY (2019), American Type, Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria (2018)