Thursday, February 16, 2023, 10:00 AM – Sunday, July 02, 2023, 5:00 PM
Featured Exhibitions Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, First Floor
Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

How does one experience a photograph that appears “unphotographic”? Focusing on the material and tactile properties of the medium, Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now is the first contemporary survey to examine cameraless photography across generations, cultures, and ideologies. Referred to as photograms or contact prints, cameraless photographs are made using analogue photography’s foundational elements: light, chemistry, and light-sensitive surfaces.

Presenting recent work by over 40 artists–including Yto Barrada, Iñaki Bonillas, Ellen Carey, Hernease Davis, Sheree Hovsepian, Roberto Huarcaya, Kei Ito, Dakota Mace, Fabiola Menchelli, Lisa Oppenheim, Daisuke Yokota, among many others–Direct Contact highlights many emerging global artists and features primarily women-identifying artists. Unfolding across five sections–Age, Scale, Form, Texture, and Value–Direct Contact positions cameraless photography as both an intellectual cornerstone in the medium’s history and an enduring and important force within contemporary art.

The exhibition is curated by Lauren Richman, Assistant Curator of Photography.

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, is proud to present Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. This intimate exhibition consists of newly-commissioned work by Mexico City artist Fabiola Menchelli and Northwest artist Heather Watkins.

Saturday, February 25 at 2:00 pm, Reed Chapel, Eliot Hall
Conversation with artists Fabiola Menchelli and Heather Watkins, and exhibition curator Stephanie Snyder, followed by a public reception at the Cooley.

On view February 16—May 14
The Cooley is open to the public Thursday—Sunday, 12:00 to 5:00 pm.
Nestled in the Reed College library, it is always free. Families are welcome!

Menchelli and Watkins are artists deeply invested in the sensory and perceptual possibilities of light—along with its orbital complements, darkness and shadow. With artistic methodologies drawn from poetry, cosmogony, and scientific experimentation, the artists modulate the luminal in pursuit of unknown outcomes. Resultant forms of disappearance, reversal, and refraction communicate across the entirety of the Cooley—particularly in the center, where a hexagonal room with open ends echoes the internal angles and shadows of Menchelli and Watkins’ work.​​ As viewers move through, and around, the hexagon, their bodies draw the symbol of the lemniscate—the infinity symbol (∞). Dark Moves seeks to emulate the ways that shadow becomes a medium in the artists’ hands—contouring, obscuring, and unfolding their work across the deep, azure walls of the museum.

Menchelli and Watkins employ color, line, and saturation—dematerializing modernist geometries, and transforming planarity into ascending angles and curves. Their experiments produce enigmatic effects and lacunae—voids and folds that touch and trace one another. In Dark Moves, Menchelli brings new dimensionality to her translucent color photograms, made entirely in the dark—folding and manipulating the photosensitive paper. These alchemical agents become embodied sculptures mounted on a stainless steel substructure that thrust their geometric volumes, casting shadows on the wall. In the darkened surroundings of the space, Watkins transforms the dynamic linearity of her ink-based drawings into rising, swooping organic forms that radiate wild shadows. These sculptural forms accompany numinous gold reliefs created by imperceptible forces, and small works on paper that oscillate between a fluid lyricism and darker visions of interior compression.

Over the last two years, the artists and the curator have engaged in an extensive collaborative process, working between Portland and Mexico City. This ongoing conversation has shaped every aspect of the exhibition and its extended programing, including the forthcoming catalog by Mexico City designer Priscila Vanneuville.

In Dark Moves, seeing is not believing. Here, to “see” is to search for ways of knowing that may only be accessed through shadow, the subconscious, and the ancient iconographies of pleasure and pain at the heart of the visual imagination.

More information

Velar a Verde (Through the Green Veil), 2023
Fabiola Menchelli

Material Art Fair, Vol. 9
PROXYCO Gallery, Stand A18
Expo Reforma, CDMX
February 9th–12th, 2023

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, Omar Barquet, Madeline Jiménez, Omar Rodríguez-Graham, Sergio Gutiérrez, Ishmael Randall-Weeks, Pablo López Luz, Mauro Giaconi.

ZONA MACO, 2023
Arroniz Gallery, Booth C109
Centro Citibanamex, Ciudad de México
February 8 – 12, 2023

Imaginar la Imagen
Escuela Superior de Cine @escine_mx
Mesones 54, Centro Histórico, CDMX
Inauguración Miércoles 1 de Febrero a las 6pm
1 al 28 de Febrero 2023
L – V de 10 a 17h.

@mauricioalejo #joseluisvuevas @barbarafoulkes_ @mayagoded @silviagruner #arturohernandezalcazar @karlaleyvaleal #marcoslopez @nicolalorusso6010 @arenititas #fabiolamenchelli #fernandomontielklint @nirvanapazmx @oswaldorruiz @___i_l_a_n___ @pavkasegura

algún paso por el espacio 

Proyecto Pícaro
10 de febrero al 25 de marzo
Parral 32, Colonia Condesa, CDMX
Horarios de la galería: jueves y viernes 5-7pm, sábado 3-5pm, o por previa cita
Inauguración: 10 de febrero de 7 – 9

Taller para artistas emergentes
Imparte: Fabiola Menchelli.
Invitadas especiales: Romina Resuche, Carmen Cerberos y Laura Orozco.
Convocatoria abierta hasta el 10 de Agosto 2022.
Fechas del Taller: 31 Agosto – 7 Diciembre 2022
Horario del Taller: Miércoles, 17:30 – 20:30 hora de la Ciudad de México (UTC-5).
Formato: Taller impartido en 16 sesiones virtuales de 3 hrs. a la semana.
Todxs lxs artistas seleccionadxs recibirán una beca completa para participar en el taller, gracias a nuestros generosos patrocinadores.
Bases: https://fabiolamenchelli.com/circulo
Solicitud: Google Forms

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