Rodrigo Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles, where he serves as an Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. His practice is grounded in lived precarity and in research frameworks that borrow from science fiction and speculative methodologies, using art to trace histories of the Americas and the fraught language of belonging.
Working across photographic projects and installations, Valenzuela combines making with investigation—examining how power operates through narratives that are often invisible or bureaucratically embedded. His work studies connections between modernist architectural forms and covert interventions, and it also draws from punk’s cross-continental history to consider how marginalized youth express themselves under conditions of state and social repression.
Rather than aiming for resolution, his images stage tension between seduction and rupture. The resulting landscapes behave like arguments: vast at first glance, then unstable—pressing viewers to consider visibility, recognition, and who is permitted to feel at home.
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