On Location: Photographs from Robert Nuñez and Alejandra Rubio

About

On Location is a two-person photography exhibition featuring the work of Alejandra Rubio and Robert Nunez in McNamara Gallery outside Sheppard Contemporary. As a photojournalist, Rubio offers intimate glimpses into diverse communities, while Nunez captures the quiet and often overlooked moments of everyday life, memory, and belonging through his snapshot photos. The exhibition serves as an extension of Without Mountains and Rivers Without End.

Alejandra Rubio is a visual artist and photojournalist who works with photography and mixed media. She often embeds herself into different cultures and subcultures to share their voices, experiences and inflections, providing viewers with a respectful glimpse into their unique worldviews, concerns and aspirations.

Rubio is a member of the Yavapai-Apache Nation and grew up in Camp Verde, a rural river valley in northern Arizona, where she learned the value of the interdependent relationships between land, culture and community. While growing up, she also learned the power of sharing stories as a means of transferring knowledge and reaffirming cultural practices. Her work provides an analytical, compassionate and uniquely Native American lens from which to view, engage, learn and share the full range of human emotion and experience across cultures and subcultures — off the reservation and on the reservation. Her work navigates the complexity of the human spirit, in private, intimate and honest settings, affording her audience a respectful view into lives and socially defined relationships of people who would otherwise remain invisible, unknown, or isolated in the shadows. The breadth and diversity of my work includes photographs covering Brothels - including the Moonlight Bunny Ranch, hotel living, drugs, protests, white supremacists, biker gangs, satanism, extreme fitness, and Native American ceremonies.

Rubio’s work has been published in The New York Times, as well as numerous other publications.

As a photographer, Robert Nunez finds the melancholic and often overlooked moments of everyday life, capturing the fleeting intersections of nostalgia and identity. The work reflects the complexities of the artist's experience as a first-generation American and the child of Mexican immigrants, exploring the tension between the vibrant cultural heritage of his upbringing and the disorienting process of assimilation into American society.

Inspired by a deep-seated desire to share a unique narrative, his work creates images that document the contrast between his public persona and private reality. This dichotomy manifests in visual storytelling, revealing the subtle and often unnoticed aspects of life that resonate with his own sense of loss and belonging.