Esquema
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
Mindy Solomon is pleased to present the second solo exhibition, Esquema, of California based Chilean artist Rodrigo Valenzuela. Focusing on altered landscapes through the medium of photography, utilizing acrylic and toner on canvas, these one-of-a-kind images invoke a sense of place and displacement simultaneously. Valenzuela writes of his work:
“For most of my 20’s, I was an undocumented worker, where I was far from family and spoke broken English. My practice is informed by that lived precarity, which never leaves you. Borrowing from science fiction and speculative research methodologies, I trace the histories of the Americas and the fraught terms of belonging within those narratives, grounding them in a contemporary context. Social commentary, philosophical inquiry, and poetics converge to examine the Latin American experience as shaped by the often invisible imperialist power. In various ways, my work prompts: What does it mean to be an intellectual of color? How might deeply personal gestures expose the matrices of society and history?
In my most recent photographic series and installations, I studied how modernist architecture in Latin America operated as a Trojan horse for CIA interventions. In other projects, the history of punk across the continent informed ceramics and prints to highlight the gestures of marginalized youth under conditions of state and social repression. In my last couple of projects, I have addressed an ever-present concern: the decline of working-class narratives in the American imagination and as a political force.”
At its core, the exhibition poses difficult questions without resolving them: Who gets to belong? Whose narratives are preserved or erased? And what happens when working-class voices fade from cultural and political visibility? Examining these landscapes, one can be drawn into their apparent vastness and momentarily forget how closely questions of belonging are tied to visibility and recognition. Yet their instability resists passive viewing. In that tension between seduction and rupture, the viewer confronts a quieter unease: that belonging is never evenly granted, but produced through histories that determine who is seen, who is displaced, and who is permitted to feel at home.
About Rodrigo Valenzuela
Rodrigo Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is an Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2025 Foundation of Contemporary Art/ Richard Pousette-Dart award, 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Award, Art Matters Foundation Grant, and the Artist Trust Innovators Award.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; BRIC Arts Media, NY; Screen Series at the New Museum, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Orange County Museum, Santa Ana, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. Recent residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, Dora Maar Fellowship, Ménerbes, France; Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL; Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Lightwork, Syracuse, NY, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.
