Yañez-Lazcano’s work chronicles family history in the U.S. as it transitions from immigrants to Mexican Americans. Using large-format color portraits and still-life to re-imagine intergenerational narratives and push back on stereotypes, to-scale reproductions of colloquial family imagery address the poetic gaps and overlaps of collective memory. Further inspired by research in linguistics, Yañez-Lazcano creates sculptures and performances that engage with language ideologies. Embracing the element of repetition often found in manual labor, they collect, subtly transform, and compose discarded tools and materials related to immigrant labor in the U.S.
Tag: immigration
Farmworker Justice Day: (Evans Hall Lobby) Join racial justice organization C2C and Farmworker’s Union Las Familias Unidas por la Justica for the annual celebration of activist and faculty member José Gómez. This annual event honors José Gómez, a faculty member who was been a life-long activist for farmworker justice, LGBTQ+ justice and labor organizing.
from Rodrigo…
I construct narratives, scenes, and stories which point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. I utilize autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience. Gestures of alienation and displacement are both the aesthetic and subject of much of my work. Often using landscapes and tableaus with day laborers or myself, I explore the way an image is inhabited, and the way that spaces, objects and people are translated into images. My work serves as an expressive and intimate point of contact between the broader realms of subjectivity and political contingency. Through my videos and photographs, I make images that feel at the same time familiar yet distant. I engage the viewer in questions concerning the ways in which the formation and experience of each work is situated—how they exist in and out of place.
