2020 Faculty Biennial Profile: Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

Meet the artists of the 2020 MCAD Faculty Biennial

My work draws on conceptual and documentary practices to explore histories of political engagement and the shifting relationship between individuals and institutions. Working between photography and video, I utilize oppositions often associated with photography—truth/fiction, analogue/digital—as a means to explore changing social oppositions. In creating forms I appropriate and revise existing modes of production by leveraging reinterpretation, translation, and restaging to overlay the present against the past. In doing so I use material such as found photographs, magazine interviews, and film/television scripts to reconsider the accounting of history and suggest alternative subject positions.

Under Fire from All Sides is an installation comprising a filmed reenactment of a panel discussion on the making of the American feature film Under Fire (1983) starring Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as American journalists covering the Nicaraguan Revolution. As the discussion unravels so does the production of the recording itself with actors repeating lines, and glimpses of the set and crew. This divorces the viewer from any empathetic relationship to the video, rendering it impossible to read it for truth claims and instead demand viewers question their relationship to the video and its referent film, the historical accounts they both contain, and the techniques by which they are made available for consumption.

About Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez is a visual artist working with photography and video to examine the slippage between time and the act of image creation. His projects examine the ambiguities of language and of what is gained or lost in the translation from text to image. By restaging historically charged conversations, interviews, and performances from sources as diverse as magazines, film scripts, and newspapers, his work tests the perceptions of the past and the present, and the inherent challenges of the visual record.

He has presented solo exhibitions at the Arts Club, Chicago; La Postal, Mexico City; and Windor Contemporaneo, Madrid. Group shows include Galeria Gabriela Mistral, Santiago; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha; North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and Vox Populi in Philadelphia. His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Terremoto MX, Daily Lazy, Public Parking, and Contemporary Art Daily. He has participated in residencies at ACRE, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Reyes Rodriguez has studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been supported by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Propeller Fund, and the Illinois Arts Council.