Welcome Victor Yañez-Lazcano (RAiR 2022 - 23)
Victor Yañez-Lazcano received his MFA from Stanford University and his BFA from Columbia College Chicago. While in Chicago he balanced a freelance career in both commercial and fine art photography. During this time, he also established himself as an arts educator through the Museum of Contemporary Photography and Columbia College’s Project AIM (Arts Integration and Mentorship). In 2012, Yañez-Lazcan co-founded LATITUDE, a non-profit community digital lab for photographers in Chicago. Since 2018, he has been a visiting lecturer in art at various institutions including Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Since 2009, I have been dedicated to shaping an interdisciplinary practice that chronicles my family’s history in the U.S. as it transitions from immigrants to first-, second-, and third-generation Mexican Americans. I explore our collective identity at the intersection of race, language, class, and labor to further grapple with notions of assimilation. My research begins with collecting familial oral histories and documenting tacit assimilation patterns I believe unique to being raised in rural Wisconsin. While large format color portraits and still lives re-imagine intergenerational narratives of transition and push back on stereotypes, to-scale reproductions of colloquial family imagery celebrate the poetic gaps and overlaps of collective memory. In my series ‘the labor of language’ I focus on personal experiences related to the private and public use of Spanish and English. Inspired by research in linguistics, I create ironic sculptures and performances that engage with mundane signs and symbols as well as derogatory terms found in oppressive language ideologies to address notions of ethnic authenticity. In my series ‘the language of labor,” sculptures, installations and assemblages commemorate my family’s relationship to labor in the U.S. dating back to the Bracero Program. Embracing the element of repetition synonymous with manual labor, I collect, subtly transform, and compose discarded maintenance tools and materials as a way to further address notions of visibility related immigrant and working-class labor in the U.S. Together these congruent bodies of work articulate a commonly overlooked set experiences that often inform the American immigrant identity.