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We are not what we have seen

We are not what we have seen


Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
FEB. – MAR. 2024
Opening Feb. 5th, 19h.

We are not what we have seen


Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
FEB. – MAR. 2024
Opening Feb. 5th, 19h.

Arróniz en Angstroms
Aguascalientes 112, Colonia Roma CDMX
(Entrance through the public parkinglot)

Visiting hours
Feb 6 to 10 Feb de 11:00 a 18:00 h
And by appointment write to 5585699214

Exhibition tour with Fabiola Menchelli & Laura Orozco
Friday February 9th 11:00-14:00 h.

The exhibition We are not what we have seen by Fabiola Menchelli shows -for the first time in Mexico- a series of works that expand the corporeality of the photographic through a feminist gaze. The photograms present transcend the two-dimensionality of the medium, absorbing the sculptural. This unfolding generates a space that favors the production of new and parallel historical, procedural and formal narratives.
 
-Laura Orozco
 
Exhibition Catalog
 

 

Circular el Tiempo

Circular el Tiempo


Curated by Fabiola Menchelli
Opening: Sat. January 27, 13:00 h.
LTRL lateral

Circular el Tiempo


Curated by Fabiola Menchelli
Opening: Sat. January 27, 13:00 h.
LTRL lateral


Nicole Oppenheimer (Círculo ‘21) Posición para un pequeño desvío

 

Bucareli 108, interior 107, Centro, CDMX
JAN. 27 – FEB. 24, 2024

Opening: Jan. 27, 13:00 – 18:00 h.

LTRL is pleased to present Circular el Tiempo, curated by Fabiola Menchelli. The exhibition arises from the project Círculo de Crítica de Obra and presents the work of 14 Latin American artists. The works gravitate around the idea of circularity, a polyphonic word that unfolds, expanding the reciprocity and sense of community generated by the Circle. The artists in the exhibition explore circularity as gesture, as verb, as process, as path, as social action, in relation to time, repetition, matter and image. They invite us to rethink circularity as an axis for reimagining and inhabiting new possible futures.

El Círculo de Crítica de Obra is a workshop for emerging Latin American artists. A horizontal space designed to advise the creative processes of the participants and to expand artistic research through accompaniment and group critique.

 
ARTISTS
 
Alejandro Palomino
Andrea Bores
Andrea Martinez
Antonia Alarcon
Carmen Vela
Claudia Luna
Fernanda Contreras
Jorge Rosano
Manuel la Rosa
Nicole Oppenheimer
Pancho Westerdam
Silvestre Borgatello
Sofia Peypoch
Ximena Pereyra
 

Curated by Fabiola Menchelli

 

CATALOG
 
                        

Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins

Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins


Dark Moves:
Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins
February 16 – May 14, 2023
The Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, at Reed College
Portland, OR

Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins


Dark Moves:
Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins
February 16 – May 14, 2023
The Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, at Reed College
Portland, OR

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, is proud to present Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins.

Fabiola Menchelli and Heather Watkins are artists deeply invested in the sensory nuances and perceptual intricacies of luminescence, as well as its orbital complement—darkness (and shadow). With methodologies drawn from poetry, cosmogony, and scientific experimentation, the artists transform materials through meticulous and embodied forms of touch and transference. After decades of engagement, the artists have become the mediums of these transmissions—receiving and reciprocating the energies that breathe through their work, and their bodies, turn by turn. Conceptually and physically, it is the infinite granularity of darkness that grounds their sightlines. Shadow becomes a medium in the artists’ hands, multiplying the organic curves and honed edges of their work across the hemlock floors and deep, azure walls of the museum. Menchelli and Watkins synthesize color, line, and form in ways that dematerialize modernist geometries, diffusing planarity into soft-hued angles and flowing pours. They are seekers of the indefinable in-between, where intentionality and the unconscious meet, rising like a sunset on the other side of the earth.

Working together over a two-year period, and working between Portland, Oregon and Mexico City, the artists studied one another’s processes and intellectual interests, discussing readings, and collaborating with Cooley on the design of the exhibition. As they opened to one another’s work, and themselves, Menchelli and Watkins considered the phenomenology of the exhibition from artistic, as well as personal, perspectives. Menchelli states: “Heather and I kept having conversations about blindness and the experience of darkness—not as a cold and distant place, but as a place to inhabit and observe.” The voids and folds throughout the exhibition become moments of disappearance, reversal, and refraction—particularly in the center of the Cooley, where a hexagonal room with open ends echoes the internal geometries and shadows of Menchelli and Watkins’ work. As viewers move through, and around, the hexagon, their bodies describe the lemniscate—the symbol of infinity (∞).

Fabiola Menchelli brings radical, new dimensionality to her most recent color photograms, transforming them into kinetic, sculptural events. This occurs when Menchelli mounts the completed prints onto a thin, stainless-steel plate that she bends, via machine, along the folds of the image. Menchelli explains: “I make this work in complete blindness in the darkroom, folding the photographic paper and exposing it to various color filters, sometimes solarizing the prints in the developing bath, pushing the image to its limits. The process feels like a blind choreography of unscripted motions—a set of unrehearsed variables that I improvise each time. The uncertainty of the process frees me, and frees the work from the prejudice of preconception. It is a process of learning and unlearning—of experimenting and ‘failing better’ each time, to use Beckett’s phrase. This unraveling feels uncertain and exciting. It has made me reconsider the fixed mechanisms of observation that we impose upon the body, upon observation, and upon our perception of ourselves. The act of observation goes beyond vision and can be a gentle and generous approach—pushing against the historical violence of the camera, shooting and capturing images that capitalize reality. Instead, I want to turn the lens inward, even remove the camera altogether, and let the physical structure of the medium define itself, expanded and unfixed—liquid, open and multiple.” The completed pieces become an abstract portrait of the interaction between Menchelli’s body and the photosensitive paper, as they dance in total darkness for hours at a time. We feel this choreography in the layers of translucent color and shape that traverse the peaks and valleys of the steel. The finished pieces exude strength and volition, yet retain the poetic lightness that characterizes Menchelli’s visionary, camera-less photography.

Heather Watkins’ refined, and weathered, standing sculptures resemble textiles and drawings deconstructed into dimensional form. The rising arrangements begin on low plinths, delineating plots where time slows to the pace of Watkins’ sophisticated dialogue with form, and its shadow. Watkins enacts and re-enacts the elements of each installation in situ, over days, and weeks, as though writing or interpreting a text. The work’s phenomenological grammar is her private poetry. In fact, her small, atmospheric ink drawings—Before Things—interpret the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. They are hidden within the space, on the cusp of luminescence. Atop the arrangements’ formal stacks of reclaimed wood and pedestals, designed by the artist, paper sculptures bend and arc. Their elegant and sinuous contours shimmer with the evidence of their past lives as drawings—gorgeous black ink-pours that Watkins held at the edges, and guided to resolution. Dark upon dark. To create the present-tense objects, Watkins excised the flowing lines, shifting them from darkness to light. Watkins offers a beautiful description of the process as it relates to her broader vision of perpetual creation: “The works in the exhibition take the process of creation through multiple, successive actions and gestures, each move informed by the last. The ink drawings that I transform into sculptures, for instance, trace my body’s movements as I guide the liquid across the paper, working with, and against, gravity, and participating in their formation in a vulnerable, yet physically immediate way, with heightened senses. I return to them with a blade, tracing their edges, drawing them out, and lifting them into new realities. Freed from their grounds, the fluid lines become something else—spatial, precarious, open, and unbounded.” Processes of sustained transference have evolved throughout Watkins’ work over decades. In Dark Moves, they are accompanied by numinous gold reliefs, created by imperceptible forces that oscillate with a fluid lyricism, in dialogue with Watkins’ evolving, sculptural project.

Like cosmic sisters, Menchelli and Watkins embrace the dialectic of darkness and light as a dialectic of purpose—an illusion of permanence allowing the mind to pause and reflect: and beyond that, to survive. What cosmic phenomenon is more fundamental to how we imagine ourselves than our struggle for self-realization through the earth’s diurnal rhythms? We live this moment every night—the moment dark and light separate—and we were born, wondering. As the curator of the exhibition, it has been a remarkable experience gaining so much knowledge about, and supporting the work of, these two brilliant and dedicated artists.

I am full of, and shadowed by, enduring gratitude and affection.

—Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery

 

Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023
Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023

Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. On view February 16—May 14, 2023

 

Through the Green Veil

Through the Green Veil


Fabiola Menchelli
Material Art Fair, Vol. 9
PROXYCO Gallery, Stand A18
Expo Reforma, CDMX
Feb 9–12, 2023
Text by Laura Orozco

Through the Green Veil


Fabiola Menchelli
Material Art Fair, Vol. 9
PROXYCO Gallery, Stand A18
Expo Reforma, CDMX
Feb 9–12, 2023
Text by Laura Orozco

Through the Green Veil is an installation by Fabiola Menchelli that distances itself from the conventions of the photographic apparatus to expand its languages ​​and functions. The pieces—configured from the folds of the photographic paper itself—lose their “optimal” and impeccable character to take a three-dimensional form. This action proposes a break with the hegemonies of photography: it includes the error as a tool to question the interstices of the image. The work replicates one act—the fold—but in its repetition the gesture is resignified in a space open for negotiation between support, color, light and architecture.

Between the soft gradients appears a curtain framed by the saturation of magenta, a pigment present in the pieces thanks to its opposite: a green filter. The exploration of the limits of hot pink takes an impetuous place that overflows from the art object to the entire space, and directs the viewer’s gaze towards the whites, to the lack of time and content in the image. The white cube refers to that absence present that privileges and sustains the work in question. This tension between pigment, spatiality and gaze is a conscious wink to the actions and prejudices associated with femininity, valid as a female artist. Menchelli subverts the function of the magenta color under a character of accumulation and occupation, and leaves any previous association suspended. The artist leads us towards that middle space between the work and what surrounds it. There is a loss of absolutes that allows us to look at interiority from exteriority and vice versa. The installation becomes a liminal space, a prelude to what is to come.

Laura Orozco

Fabiola Menchelli, appr oc he Paris

Fabiola Menchelli, appr oc he Paris


I carry all the names I’m given
FABIOLA MENCHELLI
approche salon, Paris
NOV. 8 – 13. 2022

Fabiola Menchelli, appr oc he Paris


I carry all the names I’m given
FABIOLA MENCHELLI
approche salon, Paris
NOV. 8 – 13. 2022

   at 

 

a ppr oc he
Marshall Gallery
9 — 12 November 2023
Le Molière, Paris

 

 


a ppr oc he, Marshall Gallery, 9 — 12 November 2022, Le Molière, Paris

a ppr oc he, Marshall Gallery, 9 — 12 November 2022, Le Molière, Paris
Fabiola Menchelli To time the end, 2022 Unique C-Print folded inside wood frame with Ultravue-glass 70 UV print dimensions: 51 x 69 cm

 

Fabiola Menchelli To speed up truth, 2022 Unique C-Print folded inside wood frame with Ultravue-glass 70 UV print dimensions: 51 x 69 cm
Fabiola Menchelli, Tie it gently to the exit wound, 2022
Unique C-Print photogram folded inside wood frame, with Ultra 70% UV Glass
print dimensions: 8 x 10 in / 20.32 x 25.4 cm

Fabiola Menchelli To weave and destroy I, 2022
Unique C-Print folded inside wood frame with Ultravue-glass 70 UV
print dimensions: 25 x 24 in / 64 x 50.5 cm

Fabiola Menchelli To weave and destroy II, 2022
Unique C-Print folded inside wood frame with Ultravue-glass 70 UV
print dimensions: 25 x 24 in / 64 x 50.5 cm
Fabiola Menchelli, Ya no hay río ni llanto 2022
Unique C-Print folded inside wood frame with Ultravue-glass 70 UV
8 x 10 in / 20.32 x 25.4 cm
Fabiola Menchelli, We mimic the openness, 2022
Unique C-Print photogram folded inside wood frame, with Ultra 70% UV Glass
print dimensions: 62 x 47 cm
Fabiola Menchelli, The taste of pinching sound, 2022
Unique C-Print folded inside wood frame with Ultravue-glass 70 UV
8 x 10 in / 20.32 x 25.4 cm
Fabiola Menchelli, to time the end, 2022
Unique C-Print photogram folded inside wood frame, with Ultra 70% UV Glass print dimensions: 51 cm x 69 cm

Helio

Helio


HELIO
SPACE DD47
Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. 
Oct 22 – Nov 29, 2022.

Helio


HELIO
SPACE DD47
Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. 
Oct 22 – Nov 29, 2022.

HELIO is a group exhibition of Mexican artists who have employed the use of traditional heliogravure in their practice. Dating back to the 19th century, heliogravure is a photographic printing process where a copper plate is exposed to a film-positive, then etched, and run through a traditional printing press that leaves an image on paper. 

As technology and access rapidly increased — particularly the speed of silver-gelatin printing and consistently evolving smartphone technology of the 21st century — heliogravure began to lose popularity, becoming an antiquated and somewhat obsolete process , however Heliogravure has seen a resurgence in recent years, and particularly in Mexico City as the workshop of artist and photographer Miguel Counahan has operated as a collaborative space for artists to learn the medium and process, and apply it to their own work. HELIO, is an exhibition of work by artists selected to visually interpret the sojourn of a Stoic — a narrative journey of the artist Miguel Counahan himself. It also illustrates the physical process of heliogravure itself through a selection of images, copper plates, positives, and tests done by all the artists who have passed through the studio, El Taller de Mike.

Artist: Mike Counahan @eltallerdemike, Eunice Adorno @euadorno, Silvana Agostoni @sagostoni, Tomás Casademunt @tomascasademunt, Fernando Etulain @fernandoetulain, Guillermo Espinoza @elgraficon, Gerardo González @lobo_mex, Pilar Goutas @pilargoutas, Fernanda de Icaza @fericaza, Magali Lara @estudio_magali.lara, Carlos Iván Hernandez #carlosivanhernández, Andrea Martínez @arenititas, Rafael Martinez @rafa_ms, Fabiola Menchelli @fabiolamenchelli, Alejandro Pintado @alejandropintado, Jorge Rosano Gamboa @jorgerosanogamboa, Carla Rippey @carlarippey, Uriel Salas @uriel__salas, Miguel Angel Salazar @wimpysalazar, Martin Soto Climent #martinsotocliment, Laureana Toledo @laureanatoledo , Yvonne Venegas  @yvovenegas, Mariana Yazbek @yazbekmfoto, Sergio Yazbek @seryazbekfoto, and Tamara Goutas @tamgoutas, curated by Leslie Moody Castro @lesliemoodycastro.

This exhibition could not have been possible without the support of Luca Berta, Elena Cibin and their entire team at the Venice Art Factory @veniceartfactory, and the unparalleled generosity of Maripili Goutas. Thank you to Mike, Leslie and Pilar for your incredible work and support.

For more information download the PDF from the show.

Installation shot, Heilo: El Taller de Mike, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. Oct. 22 – Nov. 29, 2022.
Installation shot, Heilo: El Taller de Mike, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. Oct. 22 – Nov. 29, 2022.
Installation shot, Heilo: El Taller de Mike, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. Oct. 22 – Nov. 29, 2022.
Installation shot, Heilo: El Taller de Mike, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. Oct. 22 – Nov. 29, 2022.
Installation shot, Heilo: El Taller de Mike, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. Oct. 22 – Nov. 29, 2022.
Installation shot, Heilo: El Taller de Mike, Fondamenta Zattere Ai Saloni 47, Venezia. Oct. 22 – Nov. 29, 2022.

 

I carry all the names Im given, Galería Tiro al Blanco

I carry all the names Im given, Galería Tiro al Blanco


I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Galería Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, México, Mayo – Julio 2022

I carry all the names Im given, Galería Tiro al Blanco


I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Galería Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, México, Mayo – Julio 2022

I Carry All the Names I am Given (1), the title of Fabiola Menchelli’s solo show at Tiro al Blanco gallery in Guadalajara, presents a series of the same name that materially and discursively disrupts the photographic object through its interaction with other cultural practices. Folding implies an irremediable aggression against the medium, which generally appears as a smooth, continuous and two-dimensional surface. However, photography appears and is due to the transition between: negative and positive, real and fiction, digital and analog, liquid and solid, etc.

In this exhibition, the works come from analogous methodologies that require a prolonged time and an artisanal approach, intertwined with scientific knowledge. The artist folds and unfolds the photosensitive paper and exposes it to different temporalities of light exposed through various color filters. It is the same paper that provides the abstract forms that we see recorded in the piece. The sheet works as a support and tool for creating its own image. Generating these folds and breaks forces the frame to lose its usual state, opting instead for an object version, haptic, full of gestures, details and errors; it goes against its reproducible nature, and becomes unique. Photography in its most material but elusive character, concrete but indefinable, favors the deconstruction of its own system and expected functionality.

The photograms take various scales in relation to the human body, and are experienced beyond the limits of photographic paper, leaving aside their individual quality to merge with the other pieces, with the space and with the support that holds them. Therefore, they are works whose borders are difficult to define. There is an interaction between the fragments, between the start and end of each fold, line or limit. But there is also a break in visual sequentiality, generating something else, a passage between the frame and the object, the image and the sculpture. Repetition, after all, is visibility and certainty, here the irruption and the difference make it impossible to follow a traced path.

– Laura Orozco

(1) The title of the show comes from the poem “A Piece of Writing that won me $200 in eighth grade” written by the artist Manuel Arturo Abreu.

I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Galería Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, México, Mayo – Julio 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Galería Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, México, Mayo – Julio 2022
Fabiola Menchelli
If you travel far enough, 2022
C-Print única, doblada dentro de marco de madera con Ultravue-glass 70 UV
20 x 27 in / 51 x 69 cm print
Pieza unica
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Galería Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, México, Mayo – Julio 2022

Your North is not Mine, 2022
Unique C-Print photogram folded inside wood frame, with Ultra 70% UV Glass
16 x 10 in / 51 x 25.4 cm
Unique Edition
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Galería Tiro al Blanco, Guadalajara, México, Mayo – Julio 2022

A Composition of Possibilities, Marshall Gallery

A Composition of Possibilities, Marshall Gallery


A Composition of Possibilities
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, Miguel G. Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody Castro
Marshall Conteporary
Santa Monica CA
March 17 to April 30th 2022

A Composition of Possibilities, Marshall Gallery


A Composition of Possibilities
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, Miguel G. Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody Castro
Marshall Conteporary
Santa Monica CA
March 17 to April 30th 2022

Marshall Gallery is pleased to present the forthcoming group exhibition A Composition of Possibilities, featuring new collaborative work by three Mexico-City-based artists: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel G. Counahan. Curated by Leslie Moody Castro, the exhibition debuted last Fall at the Houston Center for Photography and now travels to Los Angeles with an opening reception at the gallery on Sat., March 19th. Light, landscape, phenomenology and the cosmos act as points of intersection in the experimental, photobased work of Menchelli, Martínez, and Counahan. As three emerging artists in Mexico City, they have positioned themselves as confronting and reviving a dialogue on photography as an artistic practice there. Often an underrepresented medium and considered somewhat antiquated in Mexico, the three artists are pushing the boundaries of what a photographic process can be by bending the rules and definitions of what traditional means. “Martínez, Menchelli, and Counahan push against the pictorial traditions that have long weighed heavily upon Mexican and Latinx art, providing a refreshing insight into the contemporary artistic culture of the vibrant Mexican capital. Oscillating between abstraction and landscape photography, the three artists share common interests in the investigation of light, its impact on matter, and on our perception of space.” – Houston Center for Photography The twenty-three works on view span various processes often evidencing the physical labor of the artists including altered pigment prints, textural photogravures and vibrant cyanotypes. The exhibition marks the first-time collaboration between the artists, and the first exhibitions in Los Angeles for Andrea Martínez and Miguel G. Counahan. Fabiola Menchelli exhibited with Marshall Gallery in 2021. For further details contact info@marshallgallery.art

 

A Composition of Possibilities at Marshall Gallery
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, Miguel G. Counahan. Curated by Leslie Moody Castro
Fabiola Menchelli
Constellation I, 2021
Cyanotype on cotton rag paper
24” x 30” / 61 x 76 cm
A Composition of Possibilities at Marshall Gallery
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, Miguel G. Counahan. Curated by Leslie Moody Castro
A Composition of Possibilities at Marshall Gallery
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, Miguel G. Counahan. Curated by Leslie Moody Castro
Andrea Martínez
Monolitos 09 y 10, De la serie Líneas imaginarias, 2013-2021
Impresión giclée en papel Canson Rag, 8 X 12 in c/u
Andrea Martínez
Variaciones a una idea de paisaje (Tiempo geológico/Subexpuesto), De la serie Líneas imaginarias, 2019-20
Tríptico de 210 X 90 cm, Impresión giclée en papel Canson Rag
Fabiola Menchelli
Lovers, 2021
Cyanotype on cotton paper diptych
Miguel G. Counahan
Centla y Río Miranda, 2021
Heliograph, 31.8 x 31.8 y 48.3 x 48.3
Andrea Martínez
Zenith / Nadir, De la serie Líneas imaginarias, 2019
Impresión giclée en papel Canson Rag, 50 X 40 cm c/u (Díptico)
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli and Miguel G. Counahan
A Composition of Possibilities, 2021 Heliograveur portfolio

I carry all the names I’m given, Arroniz Gallery

I carry all the names I’m given, Arroniz Gallery


I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México
Febrero – Abril 2022

I carry all the names I’m given, Arroniz Gallery


I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México
Febrero – Abril 2022

“Perhaps the world is folded in two” (1)

 

 

Thinking about the action of unfolding takes us simultaneously to the present and the past. Something had to happen to be unveiled or in vain rewound. In photography, folding implies an irremediable aggression or rupture against the materiality of the medium, which generally appears as a smooth, continuous and two-dimensional surface. However, photography appears and is, due to the transition between its opposites —negative and positive, visible and invisible, absence and presence, real and fiction, digital and analog, liquid and solid, fixity and movement, etc—, a paradox that is not unrelated to the practice of Menchelli, which focuses on expanding the language and the various conceptions of the medium by means of abstraction and the revision of its own apparatus. In this series, the artist disrupts the photographic object materially and discursively, creating hybrids that respond to an interaction between photography and other cultural practices.

There is a conscious distance from the massive and immediate use of photography and the image in Menchelli’s practice. Most of her works come from analogous methodologies used mainly during the invention of the medium, which entail a prolonged time and an almost artisanal approach, intertwined with scientific knowledge. The pieces in the series I carry all the names I’m given (1), alludes to the basis of photography: the recording of light on a sensitive material. Here, the artist folds and unfolds the color photosensitive paper in the darkroom and exposes it to different temporalities of light, which on its way to its final destination passes through a color filter. It is worth mentioning that the color we see in the final image is not that of the filter, it is its opposite. Therefore, it is the same photographic paper that provides the abstract forms that we see registered in the piece. The sheet works as a support and tool for creating its own image. As in origami, the artist assembles and disassembles the paper, generating the various figures and nuances that we see. Each fold and visible line demarcates an exposure of light and a different color filter. The work is made up of fragments, unique and autonomous frames. Multiple exposures in a single image. Material and visual interruptions. Unlike conventional photography, this form of production does not allow a delicate and exact handling of the creation processes. In the darkroom, Menchelli sees the image she is creating only at the moment of development and fixation, not before. Photography is created blindly, from an almost elusive interaction between memory and the sense of touch. Depending on the scale of the paper, the task of bringing the work into the world becomes an exercise that involves the whole body, a complicated and exhaustive exchange between the artist and the photograph.

Fragmentation is natural to the medium of photography, it is built from the selection and omission that comes from framing. It rarely presents itself as multiple, much less as transparent, presenting the traces and marks of its own production. Generating these creases and breaks forces it to lose its two-dimensional state, rectangular boundary, and pristine character. Instead, the photograph becomes a haptic object, full of gestures, details and errors. It goes against its reproducible nature, and it becomes unique. That error makes it human, or rather, that error is the visible record of the human trace. Photography in its most material but elusive character, concrete but indefinable, rigorous but imperfect, favors the deconstruction of its own system and expected functionality. At the same time, it alludes to one of the fundamental roles of photography: to be another form of visual perception beyond the possibilities of the human eye. Margaret Iversen citing Rosalind Krauss explains the relationship between photography and the fragment in the surrealist movement as a hybrid model, taking montage as writing: “The spacing makes it clear that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested with interpretations of meanings” (2). Photography as writing through montage enables the multiple. The editorial and photographic media are linked by memory. The evolution of humanity is tied to remembering, to having a faithful vestige of the past. When we went from orality to the invention of writing, the latter allowed for the first time “[…] to lengthen the life of memory by fixing words” (3) and therefore ideas. Photography does not freeze time, it records a time, and in its most basic version it allows another type of data, apparently more faithful and objective than words. We seek at all costs to prolong life in general, even more, “historically the materials and substances of art have been chosen for their longevity rather than for their meaning” (4).

Unlike how the works operate in the editorial environment, here they take on different scales, always in relation to the human body. Photograms are experienced beyond the physical limits of the book or the photographic paper, leaving aside their individual quality to dialogue with the other pieces, with the space and the support that hold them; they merge with other existing elements around them. Added to the fact that “In visual perception, color is almost never as it really is —as it physically is” (5), and thanks to the sculptural folds of the pieces, the color in the frames is conditioned to the architecture, the shades and intensities vary according to the spatial context and lighting external to them. In the darkroom, Menchelli had to project or imagine color in its sculptural version, generating a tension between the trace of the photographic ghost and the present from which the work is exhibited and observed, where it is finally fixed and complete. This combination of elements makes the viewer’s reading path less predictable, since they are works whose edges are difficult to define. There is a dialogue in the interaction of the fragments, between the beginning and the end of each fold, line or limit, but there is also a break in visual sequentiality; generating something else, a passage between the frame and the object, the image and the sculpture. After all, repetition is visibility and certainty. Here the irruption and the difference make it impossible to trace a path.

I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022

I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022
I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli
Curated by Laura Orozco
Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo
CDMX México, Feb – Apr 2022

 

(1) Cristina Rivera Garza, Newton’s disk: Ten Essays on Color, Mexico City, Bonobos Editores, National Autonomous University of Mexico, General Directorate of Cultural Diffusion, 2011, p. 44.

(2) Excerpt from the poem “A Piece of Writing that won me $200 in eighth grade” written by the artist and writer Manuel Arturo Abreu.

(3) Margaret Iversen, “The Surrealist Situation of the Photographed Object” in, Stephen Melville (ed.), Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005, p. 188.

(4) Christian Scheidemann, “Material as Language in Contemporary Art” in, Stephen Melville (ed.), Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005, p. 76

(5) Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale University, 1963, p. 1

 

A Composition of Possibilities, Houston Center for Photography

A Composition of Possibilities, Houston Center for Photography


A Composition of Possibilities:
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan.
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography
September 10—November 30, 2021

A Composition of Possibilities, Houston Center for Photography


A Composition of Possibilities:
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan.
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography
September 10—November 30, 2021

I.

He lies on his left side. His head rests like a stone atop the pillow, causing creases and ripples to form in every direction. His body rises softly under the blankets that hang and sag around him. His right side curves up to the top of his head, up and around the outline of his ear, contouring down the crevice of his neck, then over the top of his shoulder, the fold of his arm, to the drop to his rib cage. He lies with his back to her in the bed, the softness of his shape of bone and ligaments, and joints, and musculature—the shape of his mass—hidden beneath his blanket of skin covered by the fabric that blankets him.

He lies with his back to her. He faces the interior of the room, oblivious to the window behind her where beams of sunlight slowly begin to caress their way across the ceiling, dancing quietly into the corners of the room, extending their reach further and further.

They lie side by side, neither body touches the other. The palm of a hand rests on the surface of the bed, the crook of an elbow in front of a torso, the bend of the leg at the ball and socket of the hip, an inclination of a knee. Both chests rise and fall in near syncopation, floating up then down with every inhalation and exhalation, every breath in and out, and in again. Each soft and subtle movement is as slow and methodical as the erosion of earth over time, like changes and transformations of the planet, the continents, the land masses themselves.

They lie there in the slowness of sleep, two lovers in one bed, a composition of possibilities and perspectives. He faces out, she faces him, their two bodies like two mountain ranges flowing up then down against the horizon of the bed. Two bodies like formations of earth created in the intersections that collide and cause collisions of time and space and geography, the collateral damage of the daily movement of earth around sun.

A Composition of Possibilities: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX
Andrea Martinez Variations to an Idea on Landscape (Geologic Time/Underexposed) from the Imaginary Lines series, 2019-2020 Archival pigment print on Canson Rag 82.68” x 35.4” / 210 x 90 cm (Triptic)
Fabiola Menchelli
Motto, 2019 – 2021
Archival pigment print on cotton paper
76 x 50 cm / 30 x 20 in

II

Is there a difference in the life of a mountain during the day and during the night? It is the same range, the same piercing geography, the very same interruption of time and space that stands high and still and wide while the earth rotates daily. The range is a revolution, an aberration of geology, a physiology of deformations forged over a billion seconds and microseconds of time. It is a quiet revolt of adjustments and flexes, of silent curves and crests that defies gravity.

The mountain is not just a mountain. It is the peak of contrast that rises against the curtain of constellations and formations of stars that extend across the field of darkness that is night. It is all the ecosystems that exist together in the careful balance of light, elevation, flora and fauna against the backdrop of sunlight, land and rocks built up and around in quiet aggressions of natural intersections of peaks and formations, parabolas and curves that exist in the contrasts and nuances between both light and dark. It is the slow and quiet breath of two lovers existing side by side, quietly eroding with the rotation of a planet that transitions from night to day.

A Composition of Possibilities: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX
Fabiola Menchelli
Constellation I, 2021
Cyanotype on cotton rag paper
24” x 30” / 61 x 76 cm
A Composition of Possibilities: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX
Miguel G. Counahan
Punta Pajaros, 2021
Photogravure
36.8” x 25.9” / 93.5 x 66 cm
Andrea Martinez
Shadow Line 02
from the Imaginary Lines series, 2019-21
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag / fold
35.4” x 23.6” / 60 x 90 cm
Fabiola Menchelli
The Lovers, 2021
Cyanotype on cotton rag paper
Diptych 17”x22” each print / 43x55cm each print (framed separately)
A Composition of Possibilities: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX
Fabiola Menchelli
Constellation III, 2021
Cyanotype on cotton rag paper
24” x 30” / 61 x 76 cm

 

III.

Dawn extends her veil in the world beyond them. Clouds race across the gradient sky of grays, blues, pinks, and golds of a rising sun, of a planet in revolution. Clouds and earth move in opposite directions. White nebulae fold in and over each other like waves of an ocean cascading in and through, racing across and eclipsing sky in a hurried sprint from night to morning. The two lovers lie there in the very same bed, the presence of one confirming the existence of the other, two bodies side by side like their own small planets, their own little universes of ecosystems and concerns, their only commonality being the atmosphere they share in that exact moment between sleep and wakefulness.

Their two bodies lie parallel to each other, sharing atmosphere, sharing a bed. He faces out, she faces him. If her eyes were open she would see the topography of freckles moving with his quiet rhythm of breath, a landscape that ebbs and flows like a map of rocks and trees and one thousand tiny tendernesses forming in the quiet evolution that spreads up and down and across the length of his back.

She is one of two bodies existing through the existence of the other. Two perspectives of being reliant on one another, a relationship made obsolete with absence. He faces out, she faces him, two formations of rock and earth and body that lie along the horizon of a bed, sharing space and atmosphere and existence before night becomes day and their individual universes begin to part ways.

Miguel G. Counahan
Selva lacandona, 2021, Photogravure, 34.2” x 27.6” / 87 x 69.5 cm
Ceiba, 2021, Cyanotype on japanese rice paper, 18.11” x 18.11” / 46 x 46 cm
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
A Composition of Possibilities, 2021
Special edition portfolio with three 11”x14” in photogravure.
A Composition of Possibilities: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX
Miguel G. Counahan
3 de agosto 2018, 2021
Photogravure, chine colie
19.6” x 27.5” / 50 x 70 cm
Fabiola Menchelli
Constellation II, 2021
Cyanotype on cotton rag paper
24” x 30” / 61 x 76 cm
A Composition of Possibilities: Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
Curated by Leslie Moody-Castro
Houston Center for Photography, Houston TX
A Composition of Possibilities
Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX
Andrea Martínez, Fabiola Menchelli, and Miguel Counahan
A Composition of Possibilities, 2021
Special edition portfolio with three 11”x14” in photogravure.