E U Q I N O M ​ g a l l e r y ​ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EUQINOM Gallery at 1295 Alabama Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12:00 - 5:00 PM, Open by appointment only.

Four Artists Rodney Ewing Adama Delphine Fawundu Rodrigo Valenzuela Giorgia Valli September 16 - October 31, 2020

EUQINOM Gallery is pleased to present Four Artists: an annual introductions exhibition that brings ​ ​ together contemporary artists Rodney Ewing, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Giorgia Valli. Each artist explores issues of identity in various ways from the personal to the communal to the political. Four Artists will be on view from September 16 - October 24, 2020. ​ ​

Rodney Ewing’s latest series, Broken Shadows began during the 2020 pandemic’s shelter-in-place. ​ ​ ​ Originally created as a way to structure his time, the project evolved into a mining of his old silkscreens and ledger papers collected while an artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s Recology center. The work continues conversations about diaspora, place and identity with complex layerings of imagery where the visual depth mirrors the intensity of the subject matter. Pieces of Ewing’s archival material are now mixed with silkscreened images of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery alongside other figures and moments from African-American history.

Adama Delphine Fawundu’s work takes the ancient West African deity, Mami Wata, as a departure ​ point and builds on her engagement with her Mende heritage of Sierra Leone. Linking known and under-recognized geographies of the African diaspora, Fawundu’s work upends national and temporal borders. Water and hair are two textures that permeate the work. For Fawundu, water symbolizes the horrific journey of slavery and the journey that her parents chose when they moved to the US. Hair remains a socially-engineered construct of beauty and was also used as a mapping device for runaway slaves through the formation of cornrows. Uncovering nuanced entanglements within such sources of oppression, Fawundu re-imagines and glorifies the strength of her identity, culture, and network of kin.

Rodrigo Valenzuela’s New Land constructs scenes and narratives that point to the tensions between ​ ​ ​ individuals and the societies in which they live often highlighting the experiences of undocumented immigrants and laborers. Valenzuela considers the ideology of Manifest Destiny as well as the failures of the Homestead Acts that quickened the settlement of public land west of the Mississippi River. Valenzuela’s images of barren desert landscapes, the iconographic American West, invoke both these ideas of expansion and opportunity as well as painful histories of erasure that resonate with present-day debates on immigration, border control, gentrification, and climate change.

A collection of photograms from Giorgia Valli called Universo express a desire to materialise the ​ ​ ​ ​ restlessness of daily thoughts, dreams and interior worlds. Made with the ground from her childhood garden, she investigates both memories and the reality of her present life tracking the migration pattern of personal life experience. By attempting to map her own subconscious, she seeks to create a visual

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E U Q I N O M ​ g a l l e r y ​ proof or record of her own unconscious mind and then creates her own system for decoding and understanding the maps with legends made of symbols and braille-like markings. From this complex and involved process emerges the unique, Lyrical Constellations-photograms of mysterious encrypted ​ ​ symbols hand sewn on paper.

About Rodney Ewing Rodney Ewing, San Francisco, CA. Ewing’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and intimate. His work has been exhibited at Euphrat Museum of Art, Cupertino, CA; The Drawing Center, , NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Root Division, Jack Fischer Gallery, Museum of the African Diaspora, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Alter Space Gallery, Southern Exposure Gallery, and Ictus Projects. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts both in San Francisco, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, California, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, and Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking from West Virginia University.

About Adama Delphine Fawundu Adama Delphine Fawundu was born in , NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. In 2018, she completed her MFA in Visual Arts at . Ms. Fawundu was awarded a 2020 Workspace Residency at the Penumbra Foundation, NY; a 2018 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and a New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow in 2016. Fawundu co-founded and independently published the sold-out book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She was included in OkayAfrica "100 Women making an impact on Africa and its diaspora" in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, the International Center of Photography, New York, NY, the Photo Festival, Nigeria, and the Brighton Photo Biennial 2016 (UK), among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Historical Society, NY, the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

About Rodrigo Valenzuela Rodrigo Valenzuela, Santiago, Chile 1982. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA., where he is an assistant professor at University of California, Los Angeles School of Art and Architecture. Valenzuela studied art history and photography at University of Chile (2004), holds a BA in Philosophy at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA (2010) and an MFA at University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2012). Recent residencies include Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME, MacDowell Colony, NH, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, NE, Light Work, NY, Vermont Studio Center, VT, Kala Art Institute, CA and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.

Recent solo exhibitions include Screen Series at the New Museum, NY (2019), Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna, ​ ​ Austria (2018), Work in Its Place, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR (2018); American-Type, Orange ​ ​ ​ ​ County Museum, Santa Ana, CA 2018; Labor Standards, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR 2018; New Land, ​ ​ ​ ​ McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte, NC, 2017; Prole, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS 2016; Future ​ ​ ​ Ruins, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA 2015. Rodrigo Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell award for ​ painters and sculptors, Art Matters Foundation grant and Arts Innovator Award, Seattle, WA.

About Giorgia Valli Giorgia Valli was born in Bergamo in 1985. She graduated at IED Milan in 2008. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. In 2016 she exhibited for the first time in the USA at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, publishing her first photo book with the Nazraeli press. Later she became part of the collections of several American museums, such as LACMA, Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, National Gallery of Arts in Washington DC. She currently lives and works in Italy.

About Euqinom Gallery Founded in 2015, EUQINOM Gallery represents emerging and mid-career contemporary artists. The gallery is focused on presenting multidisciplinary work that expands the boundaries of photo-based practices. Ranging from the ephemeral to the documentary, the program champions work that is rigorous in process and practice and demonstrates a lively engagement with photo and art histories. EUQINOM Gallery represents their artists and works closely with their clients to create a tailored and thoughtful approach in all relationships. The gallery is proud of its dynamic roster of artists and continues to grow artist practices through a combination of interdisciplinary artist talks, museum placements, publishing and other dynamic career opportunities.

euqinomgallery.com | San Francisco | [email protected]