Rodrigo Valenzuela, Santiago, Chile 1982. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. where he is an assistant professor at University of California, Los Angeles School of Art and Architecture. Valenzuela studied art history and photography at University of Chile (2004), holds a BA in Philosophy at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA (2010) and an MFA at University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2012). Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He has received the Joan Mitchell Award, Art Matters Foundation Grant, and Artist Trust Innovators Award. I construct narratives, scenes, and stories which point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. I utilize autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience. Gestures of alienation and displacement are both the aesthetic and subject of much of my work. Often using landscapes and tableaus with day laborers or myself, I explore the way an image is inhabited, and the way that spaces, objects and people are translated into images. My work serves as an expressive and intimate point of contact between the broader realms of subjectivity and political contingency. Through my videos and photographs, I make images that feel at the same time familiar yet distant. I engage the viewer in questions concerning the ways in which the formation and experience of each work is situated—how they exist in and out of place.Recent solo exhibitions include Screen Series at the New Museum, NY (2019), Work in Its Place, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR (2018); American-Type, Orange County Museum, Santa Ana, CA (2018); Labor Standards, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR 2018; Prole, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS (2016); Future Ruins, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2015). Public collections include: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO and The Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA. Recent residencies include Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME, MacDowell Colony, NH, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, NE, Light Work, NY, Vermont Studio Center, VT, Kala Art Institute, CA and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.