Rodrigo Valenzuela

Galerie Kandlhofer is pleased to present Stature, a solo exhibition by Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela.

Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela's photography, video and installa- tion work is rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, often involving narratives around immigration and the working class.

In Barricades, Valenzuela abstracts and adapts images historically associated with protest. Drawing on his longtime interest in poetic resistance and his experience growing up under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in his native Chile—as well as research on resistance mo- vements in countries such as the Ukraine and Venezuela—the artist focuses on simple physical structures that people build in times of oppression as a means to explore civil disobedience, as well as the masks worn to protect against the authoritarian response to dissidents. The title of the series (General Song) refers to Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s volume of poetry which was first published in 1950, and narrates the history of the Americas from a Latin American perspective.

Stature, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s new photographic series, extends practices he has refined over the past five years. Studio constructions (or “performances for the camera,” as the artist calls them) are built and rebuilt purely to be photographed from a fixed perspective. The artist makes the enclosing stage, and every object within, by casting concrete and clay from discarded consumer electronics packaging. The cast objects are not glued or affixed to each other, but are balanced in tenuous arrangements that vary from abstract to highly anthropo- morphic ‚monsters‘.

The choices of polystyrene forms and concrete as medium provide Valenzuela an indirect means to explore the discards and inversions of capitalist endeavor. As in his previous four series of photographed studio constructions, the artist embeds numerous references that interest and influence him, from surrealist painting to Latin American brutalist architecture to Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s images of post-Soviet era bus stops in Armenia. The layering of so- cial critique, art historical awareness, re-evaluation of the traditions of documentary photo- graphy, and sheer playfulness are typical of Valenzuela.

The video work Prole (2015) follows a group of Spanish-speaking men as they casually move about an empty room discussing the way they work, how they present themselves as labo- rers, and their views of unionizing.

The second video work in the exhibition, The Unwaged (2017) looks at the contentious posi- tion of the unpaid intern in the contemporary workplace. The Unwaged makes a connection between personal endurance and surviving the stress of what the artist calls “capital oppres- sion.”

Rodrigo Valenzuela was born in 1982 in Chile. Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles, US.
He completed an art history degree at the University of Chile (2004), then worked in con- struction while making art over his first decade in the United States, completing an BA in Philosophy at Evergreen College and MFA at University of Washington in 2012.

Valenzuela is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.