Screening: Danielle Dean, Hannah Price, Rodrigo Valenzuela
In conjunction with the exhibition Chelsea Knight & Mark Tribe: Posse Comitatus, DiverseWorks is presenting a screening of socially and politically charged videos by artists Danielle Dean, Hannah Price, and Rodrigo Valenzuela.
Danielle Dean’s videos and installations investigate the effects of colonialism on the formation of individual and collective identity. She uses partial quotations from advertising, news media, film, and music to unravel language in an effort to examine culture. Born in the United States and raised in the United Kingdom, Dean received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and her BFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Her residencies have included the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions at the Bindery Projects in Minneapolis and Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, and in group shows at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, at the Atelier Sachlink in Vienna, and at the Tate Modern in London. Dean is currently a MFAH Core Program fellow.
Hannah Price is an artist primarily interested in the experiences of American minorities. As a mixed race minority herself, Price is interested in examining and understanding subjects with whom she is stereotypically linked, but with whom she has not shared a cultural experience. Her short film Blueprint splices fragments of a community activist’s life with an interview with emerging rap artists, revealing how individuals can either be positively embraced or negatively profiled depending upon context. Price received her MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art and her BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Rodrigo Valenzuela’s videos are situated within the contradicting traditions of documentary and fiction. He constructs narratives which reveal the tensions often found between individuals and communities, frequently using gestures of alienation and displacement. For this screening, Associate Curator Rachel Cook has chosen two of Valenzuela’s videos which both combine documentary interviews with Spanish-speaking migrant workers with elements of fiction: Diamond Box and Maria TV. Valenzuela received his MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle; his BA in philosophy with an art concentration from Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA; and his BFA in photography from the University of Chile, Santiago. He is currently a MFAH Core Program fellow.
image: Rodrigo Valenzuela, screenshot from Maria TV