EXPO Chicago
Rodrigo Valenzuela
September 13 - 17, 2017
Navy Pier, Chicago, Illinois
Booth 751
Sense of Place and New Land 

Each piece in the painting series on view at Expo Chicago begins with a film negative that Rodrigo Valenzuela has taken in the deserts of California and Washington using a medium-format camera. Valenzuela scans the film negatives, and prints the images onto large-scale xerox paper, then transferring them onto canvas using a labor-intensive process of paper removal and painted layers built with acrylic and chalk. Some of the abstract structural forms are painted on the canvas before the image is transferred, and some afterwards, creating additional depth in the image.
 
Valenzuela chooses to take desolate landscape as his starting point, utilizing the open land as metonymy for a place of possibilities. The use of xerox prints in the process references mechanization (and in a more daily way, photocopies as an early material of modern bureaucracy). The painting intervention creates small and sometimes specially confusing/impossible gestures that refer to his desire for place making. Each piece is a unique work.
 
Rodrigo Valenzuela was born in 1982 in Chile, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, after completing two years at the Core Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in the summer of 2016. Valenzuela completed an art history degree at the University of Chile in 2004, then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States, completing an MFA at the University of Washington in 2012. Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela’s work is rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, often involving narratives around immigration and the working class.
 
Valenzuela’s recent solo exhibitions included envoy enterprises in New York, Steven Deviates Gallery in Boston, David Shelton Gallery in Houston, Klowden Mann in Los Angeles, the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, the University of Memphis, and Galerie Lisa Kandholfer in Vienna. Solo exhibitions in 2015 including the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneous in Santiago, and Upfor Gallery in Portland. This Fall, his work will be in solo exhibitions in Portland, Richmond, New York, and Monterrey, Mexico.
 
In addition to the Core residency in Houston, Valenzuela’s many residencies include Skowhegan, Bemis Center, MacDowell, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and he is currently completing a year as an Open Sessions Artist at the Drawing Center in New York. His film The Unwaged will premier at the Portland Art Museum in the Fall of 2017. His work is in the collection of the Ullrich Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Tacoma Art Museum, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and numerous international private collections, and has received recent reviews in Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe and many others. He begins his professorship at the UCLA photography department this Fall.