Rodrigo Valenzuela is not only a photographer, but a builder of worlds.
Valenzuela’s work is informed by his experience immigrating to the US as an adult from Santiago, Chile. These cogs, beams, chains struggle for leverage in a deeply inhuman space, serving as fantastic visual metaphors for exploring working class struggles, inequality, and the commodification of the human body.
His images serve as documents of invented surrealist spaces of intertwined machinery. Each of these scenes is confined in a small, concrete room without windows.
These black and white images serve a documentarian purpose: to showcase objects alive with brutal struggles, many of which are hard to define as anything other than mechanical parts- their original purposes are undefined. These various parts, such as chains, screws, and blades are hard to imagine as functional in the way they are laid out, instead a haunting, mysterious aura surrounds them.
Valenzuela’s images are not hung on the wall. Instead, they are supported by wooden scaffolding. This choice in assembly removes the work from a typical gallery presentation, into a more industrial context, as though to build on this notion of a world devoid of humanity, and repopulated by machines.
revised version
Audrey Doyle
“A builder of worlds” to describe Valenzuela’s work is an interesting statement as his mechanical composition feels confined. The way his work is hung is notable; however, it would also be helpful to dive deeper into what media he uses within his work and how that plays into the concepts within his pieces. How does the wooden scaffolding intertwine with the media that he utilizes, and why does he use black-and-white media, as opposed to color? As the reader, it would also be helpful to structure the review to show context, where his general inspirations come before the description of the work themselves.
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