Rodrigo Valenzuela

The Photography Show 2023
Presented by AIPAD
Booth #228, Center415, New York
March 31 - April 2, 2023
VIP Preview: March 30, 12 - 8pm

For The Photography Show 2023, Assembly is pleased to present work by gallery artist Rodrigo Valenzuela from his latest series Weapons (2022) and Afterwork (2021). These works continue the Los Angeles-based artist’s ongoing investigation into issues of labor, the history of unionization, and the consequences of automation.

Art historian, curator, and writer Paula Kupfer has described the impact of the Weapons and Afterwork: 

Through a patina of nostalgic fantasy, Valenzuela’s Weapons offer views of imaginative performances that might take place on a job site once workers depart. Knives, screws, rope, and chains—the tools of many trades—appear reconfigured as sinister phoenixes, ramshackle sculptures, and animistic creatures of dreams. Afterwork, the earlier series, presents pictures of somber, silvery rooms filled with mechanical contraptions and fog, possibly from the sweat left hanging in the air after a long day’s work. [...] Valenzuela’s works are animated by a dream-like quality and driven by an urgent human and political exploration: that of global economics and the human dimensions of labor, considered in the wake of neoliberalism.

Valenzuela’s Weapons also push the bounds of photography’s materiality and, in some ways, recall the labor-intensive early days of the medium. To make these monumental works, Valenzuela assembles the found-object sculptures and the tableaux, makes and develops photographs, and then screen-prints the images onto canvases that have already been collaged with repurposed time cards and smeared with black ink. The artist’s mixed-media process is extensive and physically demanding, literally embedding his own labor amongst the broader ideas of what human labor and collective action mean to us in the post-industrial present. 

Some of these works were recently on view at Assembly in an exhibition called Creatures of the Grind, curated by Paula Kupfer. Simultaneously, Valenzuela’s Weapons and other works were also the subject of a major solo presentation at BRIC House in Brooklyn, NY entitled New Works for a Post Worker’s World, which was reviewed by the Brooklyn Rail.

Assembly is also excited to present the first NFTs to be exhibited at AIPAD. Since 2021, Assembly has been representing photographic artists in the NFT space, launching “genesis” projects from well-known practitioners such as Alec Soth, Penelope Umbrico, and Doug Dubois, among many others. In 2022, Assembly launched Assembly Curated, the first fully integrated NFT platform dedicated to fine art photography, allowing collectors from anywhere in the world to browse a curated selection of renowned photographic work and purchase it on the blockchain. Rather than eschewing the traditional gallery model, Assembly believes in bringing the physical and digital collecting worlds together. As a platform, they work alongside artists and the galleries, publishers, and institutions that support them, bringing the values of the fine art world to this emerging market while educating collectors—both traditional and digital—on the conceptual, formal, and cultural implications of the work they represent.

The work presented at AIPAD, Afterwork, is the fourth collection of NFTs from award-winning Assembly artist, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and will be a complement to the print selection on view in our booth.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982) is a Chilean-born, 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 his work deals with the experience of undocumented immigrants and laborers.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including in recent solo exhibitions at BRIC House, Brooklyn, NY; Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC; Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, TN; Klowdenmann Gallery, Los Angeles; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile. He has held several artist residencies across the US and Canada including a fellowship at the Drawing Center, New York; the Core Fellowship at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME and the MacDowell Colony, NH. In 2021, Valenzuela was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.