Rodrigo Valenzuela, Richard Bloes

About

RODRIGO VALENZUELA . GENERAL SONG 
north gallery . 
In General Song, Rodrigo Valenzuela reimagines images of the barricade for a new series of black and white photographs. Drawing on personal experience and history in his native Chile, as well as research about other countries such as Ukraine and Venezuela, the artist focuses on simple structures that people build in times of oppression as expressions of civil disobedience. The exhibition also draws on Valenzuela's longtime interest in poetic resistance, specifically Pablo Neruda's Canto General, an encyclopedic poetic history of the New World told from a Latin American perspective.
Although Valenzuela's projects center on ideas of social justice and equity, his approach is always oblique and metaphorical, with equal attention given to formal concerns. Adapting a process developed for his 2015 exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, the artist staged barricades in his studio, then photographed and rephotographed the constructions. Negative reversal and small digital interventions further confound viewers’ perception of space and form.

Recently appointed to the Department of Art faculty at UCLA, Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982, Santiago, Chile) completed an art history degree at the University of Chile (2004), then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States, completing an MFA at University of Washington in 2012. Valenzuela’s many residencies include a Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Skowhegan School, Maine; Bemis Center, Nebraska; and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York, among others. Notable solo exhibitions include the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago; Upfor, Portland,OR; Klowden Mann, Los Angeles,CA and Lisa Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria. Valenzuela was in Open Sessions 10 at The Drawing Center, New York and his film The Unwaged premiers at the Portland Art Museum (Oregon) in fall of 2017.

RICHARD BLOES . What's that? HELP
south gallery . 
Richard Bloes’ objects are highly organized sequences of what seems to be loosely assembled elements from store-bought, woodshop scraps, and found props that are anachronistically punctuated with the hard edge and movement of video.

Feature Q & A’:

11.23.02
If you would reduce or generalize your work for discussion's sake to a polemical label - something vs. something or the x y discussion - what would that be?
I think technology always affects the making of art. The question is do you use it directly and try and take on the big "guys" (Hollywood in the case of special effects) or obliquely, to create a distance from which you can "talk" freely. Or lo-tech vs. hi-tech, but this definition is very slippery, as a ten year old hi-tech movie can look very lo-tech today, but by creating these pieces from "scratch" and not using any imaging processing, I avoid the look of a certain time based on what technology was available. But basically I'm on the lo-tech side of things. Lately I also think about complexity vs. minimalism and I try to make these pieces as complex as they need to be but also as concentrated (which is how I see minimalism now) as possible.

Why wood, it always seems to have a distinct presence in your work?
When I first started doing these pieces in the early Eighties, I wanted to use similar materials that surrounded TVs where they were in people's houses. At that time video production was not in everyone's homes and production seemed elitist. So I used hardware store and lumber yard materials. Over time the wood seems like it has come to be more important, in the way that it seems a visual representation of stored information (growth patterns in the wood grain) or the general wave patterns, like a frequency. "Waking Table" suggests that we are in an age of electronic wood veneering or marquetry. The use of wood also led to furniture, which led to "some assembly required" (when you purchase furniture sometimes) and kits.

Most artists separate video from sculpture yet you keep mushing them together despite their being difficult partners. What is exciting to you about this relationship?
A lot of artists are using video projection now and that rarely involves any sculptural setting, more like mini-multiplex theaters where the viewer walks from one darkened room to another and I can find that sort of oppressive and "closed", whether I like the work or not. I play somewhat with the idea of a theater by incorporating chair pieces into the sculpture but what I like the most is that people can walk around the whole piece and that acknowledges their physical presence and freedom of movement. It also gives the viewer more things to look at, like finding that the black and white monitor with snow on the screen is what was reflected in the plastic tube as blue lines, that relates to the wood veneer below it.

Richard Bloes was born in Waterloo, Iowa and received an MFA from the University of Iowa. Notable solo exhibitions include P.S.1, NY; American Museum of the Moving Image, NY; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. The artists work was also exhibited in galleries and institutions such as Feature Inc. New York, NY; The Kitchen, NY; New Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Sculpture Center, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Contemporary Arts Center; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; PBCC Museum, Palm Beach, FL; Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; Berlin Film Festival, Berlin, Germany; Tokyo Video Festival, Tokyo, Japan.