Marshall Gallery presents a summer exhibition anchored by the works of one of LA’s great young artists, Rodrigo Valenzuela, showing recent works from his series New Land.
Interspersed among the Valenzuela installation is a selection of vintage photographs from the New Topographics era, primarily from the 1970s and 80s, taking a cross-generational look at the potential energies and implications of land development and space in the American West. Prints included are by artists Robert Adams, Nicholas Nixon, and Henry Wessel, as well as Mark Ruwedel, Minor White, John Szarkowski, and William Garnett. In the gallery’s project room, a selection of Valenzuela’s photography series American Type is also on display. With this juxtaposition, the gallery continues to champion artists expanding the creative potential of photo-based art as its primary curatorial focus while placing them within the perspective of the medium’s historical pendulum.
The exhibition LAND/SPACE originated with and is centered around the mixed media works of Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982), an artist who works predominantly through conceptual photography but is equally accomplished in video, installation, and sculptural practices. Upon first view, one encounters floating canvases layered with geometric abstractions over arid landscapes, but as with all of Valenzuela’s projects, themes of labor, immigration, and socio-political hierarchies are at play. The pieces on view, made by a laborious photo-transfer process utilizing toner-based inks and acrylic paint, depict translucent polygons floating, untethered among California deserts. The fields of varying opacities appear like architectural walls of glass in some future modernist architecture or perhaps a holographic land art installation. But upon closer inspection, their façade is faded and scarred as a result of an imperfect interchange of substrates, bearing a rough surface antithetical to the “Finish Fetish” sought by earlier generations of LA artists from the Light and Space movement
Rodrigo Valenzuela & The New Topographics : Land/Space
Until August 17, 2024
Marshall Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave. #A 6
Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.marshallgallery.art
