Contemporary artist Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA., where he is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela meditates on the built landscape more abstractly while often highlighting themes of labor, alienation, and displacement in his work. In his series, American-type (2018), he specifically responds to the content and aesthetic of Baltz’s work. Building quixotic architectural assemblages with two-by-fours and other raw construction materials and then photographing them, Valenzuela draws attention to the labor inherent in constructing our cities and the undocumented labor force that is often relegated to the shadows in our society.

Contemporary artist Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA., where he is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela meditates on the built landscape more abstractly while often highlighting themes of labor, alienation, and displacement in his work. In his series, American-type (2018), he specifically responds to the content and aesthetic of Baltz’s work. Building quixotic architectural assemblages with two-by-fours and other raw construction materials and then photographing them, Valenzuela draws attention to the labor inherent in constructing our cities and the undocumented labor force that is often relegated to the shadows in our society.

Lewis Baltz lived and worked in California for the core period of his career. Baltz attended graduate school at Claremont College during a period when “Light and Space” artists such as Larry Bell were teaching. The minimalist style of his mentors is certainly apparent in Baltz’s working methods. Between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s, Baltz created an ambitious body of work primarily consisting of film-like portfolios.

Throughout the 1970s, Lewis Baltz (1945-2014) captured the changing landscape he observed across the American West, with Park City, Utah notably becoming one of his subjects. Under Construction features this important work, composed of 102 images taken in 1978 and 1979 in the then rapidly developing area of Prospector Park. Park City has long been considered one of the central portfolios in Baltz’s groundbreaking career and highlights in documentary fashion the dramatic change that was taking place during this city’s reinvention as a ski resort.