Art Out: Adam Broomberg, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Jana Sophia Nolle
©Adam Broomberg, Glitter in My Wounds #1, 2021, C-type hand print, unframed, 20 x 16 inches (50 x 40 cm)
Signs and Symbols | January 6, 2022 - February 12, 2022
Adam Broomberg with CAConrad and Gersande Spelsberg: Glitter in my Wounds
signs and symbols is pleased to present Glitter in My Wounds. For his first solo exhibition at the gallery, Adam Broomberg invites CAConrad and Gersande Spelsberg as his collaborators. The exhibition presents a selection of hand printed, photographic portraits of the trans activist and actress Gersande Spelsberg taken by Broomberg, accompanied by a sound piece featuring Spelsberg’s voice and CAConrad’s poetics. Spelsberg’s story of transitioning reflects on and questions the many toxic pre-existing conditions that shape contemporary gender roles, further informed by CAConrad’s poetry on confronting identities that had previously felt fixed and immutable.
Adam Broomberg has long been fascinated by the binary positions of two photographers from the 20th Century — the famous Weimar Republic photographer, August Sander, and his lesser-known contemporary, Helmar Lerski. Sander’s work has come to embody the humanist notion in photographic portraiture — the ability to sum up one's character in the exquisite, well-timed and well-framed chosen moment. Lerski’s approach to photography was radically in contrast with that of Sander’s — he believed that photography was nothing more than a rendering of light on skin on bone — a very materialistic reading of the medium. It should come as no surprise that Lerski’s radical stance has resulted in an almost complete erasure from the photographic history canon.
Rodrigo Valenzuela, Afterwork #2, 2021, silver gelatin print, 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.28 cm), edition of 3 with 1 AP.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles | January 8, 2022 - February 19, 2022
Rodrigo Valenzuela
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce RODRIGO VALENZUELA: New Works for a Post-Worker World, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from January 8 through February 19, 2022, with an opening reception to be held on Saturday, January 8th from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm.
In their projection of a post-worker’s world, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s Afterwork series and Weapons series speaks to the elimination not only of individual laborers but of the idea itself of the work force, pushed aside by the very shapes we see here: odd machines and automation, engines that no longer require an operator, but that rage when no one is watching.
At the height of early industrial steel production, workers were treated as engines, their bodies wrung out of vitality, transformed into glowing steel bars, sweat and capital. The smoke in Valenzuela’s series of photographs invokes the blazing steam and white heat of steel in the process of formation, but also the perspiration of labor indefinitely suspended in air. In these depopulated photographs, viewers are left to their own imaginative devices. Valenzuela’s contemporary Frankensteinian contraptions are uncanny, and some have a sinister edge, embodied by the threat of metal chains and hooks. Others are delicate, almost sympathetic.
#01 Living Room, SF 10,5
Blue Sky Gallery | January 6, 2022 - January 29, 2022
Living Room: San Francisco & Berlin
Jana Sophia Nolle’s series Living Room: San Francisco & Berlin concentrates on the ever-growing rift between rich and poor. Now living and working primarily in Berlin, her conceptual photographic study of makeshift shelters began during her stays in San Francisco from 2016 — 2019.
Nolle works with people living on the streets to understand how their improvised dwellings are constructed. After establishing relationships with the unhoused individuals, and with their permission, Nolle approaches wealthy people for permission to access their homes. Then, in a performative act, she recreates and photographs the makeshift shelters within the homes of the wealthy.
The photographs are an inventory, a typology of improvised dwellings, cataloging their various attributes. The elaborate reconstructions show a conglomerate of repurposed items and materials, resulting in a series of architectural interiors. While aesthetically striking, Nolle’s resulting contrast of living spaces also touches on larger phenomena of socio-political changes, housing shortages, exclusion and gentrification. The project aims to challenge our perceptions and definitions of living space and wealth, of poverty, and the importance of refuge and security.
