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Arts & Culture

Light Work Presents 鈥楻odrigo Valenzuela: American Type鈥�

Friday, January 25, 2019, By Cjala Surratt
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art exhibitionLight Work

presents “Rodrigo Valenzuela: American Type,” a solo exhibition on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery through March 1. The opening reception on Thursday, Jan. 31, from 5-7 p.m., features a gallery talk with Rodrigo Valenzuela at 6 p.m. Signed copies of聽 “American Type” exhibition catalog,聽Contact Sheet 200聽will be available to collectors after the talk.

art work

Light Work is located in the Robert B. Menschel Media Center, 316 Waverly Avenue. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

聽聽work boldly addresses themes of labor, power and representation. For a Chilean artist living in America at a moment in which the president of the United States continues pressing for a border wall, the underlying narrative of Valenzuela鈥檚 work鈥攐f immigration and the struggles of the working class鈥攊s as charged as ever.

The title of the exhibition, “American Type,” refers to a 1955 essay in which art critic Clement Greenberg frames the work of abstract expressionist painters such as Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, and Rothko as distinctly American. Greenberg proposed that post-war American painting was more about the act of painting itself than about any complex idea of representation. Valenzuela finds it interesting to challenge this concept and, as he puts it, to contemplate聽鈥渉ow much the absence of content has become the American gold.鈥澛燞e doesn鈥檛 argue that abstraction is necessarily without subject or emotion, but Valenzuela questions Greenberg and art world elitism more generally by making his own subversive abstractions that he imbues with social-political meaning.

Valenzuela鈥檚 approach to representation in his work draws our attention to the extensive labor of his artistic process. Every aspect of his work shows a trace of his own labor, from the building of studio assemblages, to the photographic steps that lead to the final prints. Even the wooden frames that hold the work have been cut, assembled, and painted by his hand. Labor is inherent in the making of all art, but for Valenzuela it becomes a compelling central subject.

Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied art history and photography at the University of Chile (2004), holds a B.A. in philosophy from The Evergreen State College (2010), and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington (2012). Recent residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, Nebraska), Center for Photography (Woodstock, New York), Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Light Work (黑料不打烊), MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, New Hampshire), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Recent solo exhibitions include聽Future Ruins聽at Frye Art Museum (Seattle, Washington), Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer (Vienna, Austria, 2018),聽Work in Its Place聽at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, Oregon, 2018),聽New Land聽at McColl Center (Charlotte, North Carolina, 2017),聽American-Type聽at Orange County Museum (Santa Ana, California, 2018),聽Labor Standardsat Portland Art Museum (Portland, Oregon, 2018), and聽Prole聽at Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, Kansas, 2016). Valenzuela is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, University of California at Los Angeles, and recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors. He participated in Light Work鈥檚 Artist-in-Residence Program in August 2017.

 

  • Author

Cjala Surratt

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