FONCA Young Creators Grant

Centro Cultural Chapultepec El Amate,
Cuernavaca, Morelos, MX
Sep — Dic, 2015

FONCA Young Creators Grant

Centro Cultural Chapultepec El Amate,
Cuernavaca, Morelos, MX
Sep — Dic, 2015

Concrete Space suggests the limits and tensions between thought and matter. The abstract spaces are constructed inside of the camera, by making multiple exposures on the same picture plane, thus transforming the space into a mental space, that only the camera can perceive. The work seeks to speak about a phenomenology of construction through a series of instant black and white film that transform the physical space, a space made of concrete, into an abstract plane generated by light. The piece finally returns to its physicality by pushing of the wall and remembering its concrete reality.

Project supported by Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

Installation Centro Cultural Chapultepec El Amate, Cuernavaca, Morelos, MEX, 2015.

Fabiola Menchelli
Concrete Space, 2015 Instant B&W film, concrete frame
10.62 x 11.41 x 2.75 in / 27 x 29 x 7 cm

Proyecto apoyado por el Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes

Misleading Appearances

Misleading Appearances: Photographic Explorations Through Mexican Photography, 2015
Curated by Irving Dominguez
Museo Universitario del Chopo, México City
September 10 – December 13, 2015

Misleading Appearances

Misleading Appearances: Photographic Explorations Through Mexican Photography, 2015
Curated by Irving Dominguez
Museo Universitario del Chopo, México City
September 10 – December 13, 2015

A selection of works and artists for whom photography is a field of discursive articulation, an arena for the construction of representations that interact through two-dimensional and three-dimensional devices, absent of movement or immersed in the conventions of audiovisual language. In any case, photography is treated as a space for research and experimentation, rather than a mere visual device.

The intention is to propose an exchange of interpretations, approaches and conceptualizations about the image that incorporate photographs or elements of this medium to be processed, re-signified and returned as part of a critical reading both from a formal perspective and in the field of signs, their various characterizations (index, icon or symbol) and the implications that they reveal to the viewer through the themes that feed each of the proposals of the participating artists.

The exhibition will be made up of works by Mexican artists and artists residing in the country from different generations. There is an emphasis on the production of creators from the north of the Republic, as well as in the diversity of media that make up the selection of pieces.

Participating Artist: Colectivo Estética Unisex (México – Colombia); Edgar Durán (Ciudad de México, 1982); Lorena Estrada Quiroga (Nuevo León, México, 1970) y Futuro Moncada (Colombia, 1971); Julie Escoffier (Francia, 1989); Carlos Iván Hernández (Ciudad de México, 1984); Alfredo Káram (Sonora, México, 1980); Ilán Lieberman (Ciudad de México, 1969); Michael López Murillo (Colombia, 1973); Jason Mena (Puerto Rico, 1974); Fabiola Menchelli (Ciudad de México, 1983); Andrés Felipe Orjuela (Colombia, 1985); Miguel Ángel Ortega Bugarín (Jalisco, México, 1982); Marta María Pérez Bravo (Cuba, 1959); Roberto Salazar (Nuevo León, México, 1978); Pavka Segura (Ciudad de México, 1971); Wolfgang Scholz (Alemania, 1958); Isaac Torres (Ciudad de México, 1982); Marco Treviño (Monterrey, Nuevo León, México, 1986); David Vera (Sonora, México, 1989).

Proyecto apoyado por el Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes y por el Museo Universitario del Chopo.

Museo del Chopo

2015_menchelli_chopo_expo_003 — Las apariencias engañan: Exploraciones a partir de la fotografía en México, Curaduría: Irving Domínguez, Museo Universitario del Chopo 2015.

2015_menchelli_chopo_expo_004 — Las apariencias engañan: Exploraciones a partir de la fotografía en México, Curaduría: Irving Domínguez, Museo Universitario del Chopo 2015.

2015_menchelli_chopo_expo_005 — Las apariencias engañan: Exploraciones a partir de la fotografía en México, Curaduría: Irving Domínguez, Museo Universitario del Chopo 2015.

2015_menchelli_chopo_expo_007 — Las apariencias engañan: Exploraciones a partir de la fotografía en México, Curaduría: Irving Domínguez, Museo Universitario del Chopo 2015.

2015_menchelli_chopo_expo_008 — Las apariencias engañan: Exploraciones a partir de la fotografía en México, Curaduría: Irving Domínguez, Museo Universitario del Chopo 2015.

2015_menchelli_chopo_expo_010 — Las apariencias engañan: Exploraciones a partir de la fotografía en México, Curaduría: Irving Domínguez, Museo Universitario del Chopo 2015.

Proyecto apoyado por el Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes y por el Museo Universitario del Chopo.

From the sculptural to the archive

XVI PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNALE – CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN
CURATED BY MAGNOLIA DE LA GARZA
2014 – 2015

Fototeca Nuevo León – Centro de las Artes Parque Fundidora
Monterrey, Nuevo León
November 21st, 2014 – February 22nd, 2015
Centro de la Imagen
México City, México
May 25th – August 16th, 2015

This survey of the 16th Photography Biennale centers on two points of discourse, the sculptural and the archival. The exhibition is articulated around two prize-winning entries, María María Acha-Kutscher’s Womankind and Fabiola Menchelli’s Constructions, as well as around three projects that received the jury’s honorable mention. Menchelli’s and Acha-Kutscher’s works are at opposite ends of the show’s main axis, which takes us on a journey from the relationship between photography and sculpture to the photographic use of archives.

The exhibition features several of the photography and video projects selected by the jury of the Biennale; it also includes certain works that were eliminated in the final selection, as well as one guest project. All of these works guide us and lead us to pose questions on the road from the sculptural to the archival in photography.

But the archive is also the construct that leads us to reconsider the photographic image, its uses and circulation. Everything from the recovery of public archives, or of private ones such as family albums, to their appropriation and manipulation implies that we reexamine our memories, while all this also establishes a new association with the past and leads to the creation of small monuments.

– Magnolia de la Garza

From the sculptural to the archive

XVI PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNALE – CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN
CURATED BY MAGNOLIA DE LA GARZA
2014 – 2015

– Magnolia de la Garza

XVI Bienal de Fotografía del Centro de la Imagen, Ciudad de México

The Depth of Surface

XVI PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNALE – CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN
CURATED BY MAURICIO ALEJO
México
2014

MASIN Museo de Arte de Sinaloa
November 27th, 2014 – February 22nd, 2015
Centro Cultural Clavijero
March 13th – June 14th, 2015

Trying to find a common theme among artists as diverse as those featured in this 16th Photography Biennale is a daunting task, especially given that the exhibition entailed an open, countrywide call for submissions. But if not a common theme, there is a common way of approaching photography in all the works presented here, and it has to do with the weakening of the relationship between photography and reality.

All the artists featured here share an awareness that the truths put forth by photography do not belong to reality, but instead to a world that is constructed in images. This world is not interposed between us and reality, but rather has itself become real. The realization that the image has lost the ability to serve as a bridge to the “world” manifests itself in many of the pieces here as a growing opacity that reduces the depth of photographic representation and focuses our attention instead on the surface as a material and an object.

Though this opacity is not literal, it manifests itself in that it creates a tension on the surface, bringing visual or conceptual relations to the fore. Thus, access to the referent becomes secondary and one’s attention turns towards structure itself and the meanings or experiences it produces. This explains, among other things, why artists are increasingly dealing with photographic archives, which also appear in this show and function as an alternate universe—a legible one where collective and personal memory is encoded, and which can be reconfigured to produce other possibilities of experiencing the real.
In order to broaden the discussion, I decided to invite a few established artists with a solid body of work who have contributed lucid opinions to the understanding of photography. Thus I wish to thank Iñaki Bonillas, Jonathan Hernández and Diego Berruecos for participating, as their work has fostered a visual dialogue that contributes much to our understanding of this collective artistic concern.

– Mauricio Alejo

The Depth of Surface

XVI PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNALE – CENTRO DE LA IMAGEN
CURATED BY MAURICIO ALEJO
México
2014

MASIN Museo de Arte de Sinaloa
November 27th, 2014 – February 22nd, 2015
Centro Cultural Clavijero
March 13th – June 14th, 2015

– Mauricio Alejo

XVI Bienal de Fotografía del Centro de la Imagen, Centro Cultural Clavijero, Michoacán, Morelia

Constructions, Yautepec

Yautepec Gallery, México City
October 9 – December 10, 2014

My friends, I fear that architecture no longer has any place for us. Its axes are dull, its plans laid bare. Reality Properties, Fake Estates.

We should instead drink deep of the illusion of this world. The photograph is at least a reliably honest charlatan. In Spanish, one does not develop film as one develops realty, one reveals it. For realty is not reality, nor is reality provably real.

We construct upon realty with architecture but we construct reality behind our eyes. We reveal it. We remove the veil. We make it real. The universe may simply be a hologram, just as flat and illusion as the space which lies behind the surface of a photograph, a painting, or the screen on which you read this.

So let us stand confidently in this uncertainty, with no roof over our heads. Let us flee the misguided utopias of architects as we embrace the prototopia of the image, for the times they are a-changing, always and always faster.

– Brett W. Schultz

Constructions, Yautepec

Yautepec Gallery, México City
October 9 – December 10, 2014

My friends, I fear that architecture no longer has any place for us. Its axes are dull, its plans laid bare. Reality Properties, Fake Estates.

– Brett W. Schultz

CONSTRUCTIONS Fabiola Menchelli, Yautepec Galley, 2014

Constructions, Paine Gallery

Paine Gallery, Massachussetts College of Art and Design
Boston, MA
2013

Constructions, Paine Gallery

Paine Gallery, Massachussetts College of Art and Design
Boston, MA
2013

In a digital age where the boundaries between the virtual and the physical blend and generate new experiences, I am interested in using the language of abstraction to make images that seem to present a tangible visible reality but which are never quite there, except in the eye of the camera and the mind of the maker. In the studio, I construct installations using simple materials and project light onto them. I seek to transform the physical with light and shadow. The process of integrating these elements into a picture allows me to play with the materiality of thought. I aim to challenge our beliefs about perception and make thought visible by drawing attention to the light as it embraces the surface of paper and animates space. The interaction between light and shadow transforms these ephemeral installations into complex visual spaces that evoke a world that is both physically tangible and as elusive as light, both virtual and real.