The Mesmerizing Depth and Desolation of Desert Landscapes
Abstract lines and shapes break up Rodrigo Valenzuela’s barren mixed-media landscapes
Department of Art Assistant Professor Rodrigo 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.
"MEXICO CITY — Earlier this month, Mexico City opened its fifth annual Material Art Fair, under the banner of “Freedom to Art” — a spirited, if awkwardly articulated, catch phrase. At the booth of Portland-based gallery Upfor, Sense of Place, an installation of Rodrigo Valenzuela’s luminous landscape scenes, captivated a throng of fairgoers. In vibrant mixed-media works, wild succulents punctuate otherwise barren landscapes in Joshua Tree National Park and Chile’s Atacama desert.
Using a multi-step photocopying process, Valenzuela projects abstract lines onto unpeopled desert scenes — hinting at houses, governmental offices, and memorial structures yet to be built. Valenzuela’s labor-intensive practices reference the paperwork-heavy process of applying for citizenship in the US, with which he’s directly familiar. He’s now a professor with permanent residency, but when he first moved to the US in his 20’s, he was an undocumented construction worker. He spoke to Hyperallergic about growing up in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, reckoning with the troubling histories of beautiful landscapes, and reconciling the idealized American Dream with the realities of life as an undocumented person.
Tell me about the process you used to make the series Sense of Place.
I document landscapes with black-and-white film, and then print them with photocopies and make image transfers. It’s all a metaphor for bureaucracy. I remove layers of paper with my fingers and a toothbrush and some sponges, so that only some of the toner makes its way into the canvas.
It’s a very labor-intensive process, and it’s work, just like how landscaping is work. To me, making art is a way of making essays. I think through images — visually and materially. I would write if I could, because it would be way cheaper."— Anna Furman, Feb. 22, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article at the Hyperallergic website.
Read more about Rodrigo Valenzuela.
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