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.