Artist Rodrigo Valenzuela among LA artists showing at Frieze LA art fair
Rodrigo Valenzuela joined the UCLA Department of Art faculty in 2017. Valenzuela is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, video, painting, and installation. Using autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience, his work constructs narratives, scenes, and stories that point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. Much of Valenzuela’s work deals with the experience of undocumented immigrants and laborers. At UCLA, Valenzuela teaches graduate and undergraduate students in photography.
Artist Rodrigo Valenzuela among LA artists showing at Frieze LA art fair. Odd machines, both weapon-like and suggestive of mechanical creatures, inhabit artist Rodrigo Valenzuela’s solo art installation called “New Works for a Post-Worker’s World” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery.
Valenzuela’s large photo-based works play with the idea of the elimination of “workforce,” pushed aside by automatons that no longer require human operators. “To me, industrialization and the early labor union movement are a very integral part of the beginning of modernism,” Valenzuela said.
Valenzuela said he is looking forward to this year’s Frieze LA to reconnect with some of that sense of community artists have been missing over the past two years.“Because in the last two years people have been working by themselves,” he said.
Valenzuela imbues his photo-based images with layers of meaning by incorporating found materials like employee time cards. He also constructs bare wood scaffolding structures to hang the art, which creates new spatial relationships between the pieces not possible by simply hanging them on the walls.
“To position the viewer in different point of view where you can make all those perspectives happen and activate your capacity to make connections,” he explained.
“The point is to get new voices out there, to think about artists who are maybe underrepresented, stories that haven’t been told or seen before,” Hunt explained.
Mixing the familiar (industrial/mechanical objects) with an almost science fiction sensibility, Hunt believes Valenzuela’s work will be a powerful new voice at this year’s Frieze LA.
After the past two years, Rodrigo Valenzuela said he needs to see art in person and hang out with fellow artists once again. For him Frieze LA is an opportunity to reopen that door. — Kristopher Gee, Feb. 17, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Spectrum News website.
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