Rodrigo Valenzuela, Anastasia Samoylova Event

Rodrigo Valenzuela: Afterwork
Opening Reception
Thursday, 28th April, 5:00 pm
29th April - 28th May 2022

The smoke in Rodrigo Valenzuela’s new series of photographs invokes the blazing steam and flaring white heat of steel in the process of formation, but also the perspiration of labor indefinitely suspended in the air. The smoky constructions recall old photographs of iron and steel mill factory floors, but they do so without the workers who brought the huge engines to life and lent them their colossal scale. In these depopulated photographs, viewers are left to their own imaginative devices, prompted to envision alternate possibilities to that of a future of obsolescence.

Valenzuela’s contemporary Frankensteinian contraptions are ominous, uncanny, and have a sinister edge, embodied by the threat of metal chains and hefty hooks. But they are also by turns delicate, and almost sympathetic. By allowing the recognition of some of its parts — such as the spidery legs of a repurposed umbrella — the artist offers a glimpse of his ingenious process of reuse. Photography, the medium so attached to reality, is here put the task of world-creation, generating a vision of afterlives where capitalism might be combatted with imagination.

KANDLHOFER FOCUS

Anastasia Samoylova
Opening Reception
Thursday, 28th April, 5:00 pm
29th April - 28th May 2022

In 2013, Samoylova began Landscape Sublime, a long-term project on the pictorial conventions through which natural and manmade landscapes are depicted and understood. Whether on popular image sharing social media websites or in advertisements that permeate booming cities, landscapes are portrayed in idealised colors and perfect light. Conformist and conventional, such depictions are less about real places than the feelings they are meant to evoke. The algorithms of popular taste and fantasy have taken to an extreme those notions of the sublime landscape that first took hold in western art in the 18th century.

For the Landscape Sublime series Samoylova sources images from various online platforms as well as her own archive. These are grouped by subject (for example, ‘mountains’, ‘wildfires’, ‘glaciers’ or ‘real estate billboards’). They are then printed out, sculpted into temporary installations, and re-photographed. The final still life images appear to be somewhere between physicality and the illusion of a computer-generated space. Informed by Russian Constructivism and the feeling of tumultuous social change it evoked, Samoylova’s tableaux offer a layered and complex commentary on the delirious power of images to shape our understanding of the world.