Utilizing a diverse range of processes, Menchelli explores the contemplative influence of internal and external space. Featuring work from two different periods including five new polaroid prints, the exhibition connects the underlying ideas in Menchelli ́s work, using the language of abstraction to reinterpret space through the medium of photography.
This exhibition presents work from two different periods that connect the underlying ideas in Menchelli´s work, using the language of abstraction to reinterpret space through the medium of photography. Menchelli started working with cyanotypes in 2014, a process that connects the history of photography with architecture and its early use in blueprints dating back to the late 19th century. As an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Menchelli produced a series of unique darkroom-based, angular abstractions including two prints in the exhibition.
In 2015, an observatory at Casa Wabi in Oaxaca became Menchelli’s source of inspiration for two recent bodies of work. Designed by Tadao Ando as a site for deep contemplation, the concrete structure’s aperture is abstracted using multiple exposures in Menchelli’s series of monochromatic echoes (Ellipse, 2015) and cyanotypes (Bajo el Sol Azul, 2017). The resulting works on view speak to her continual investigations about the poetics of space, observation, and light.
Ellipse is an interconnected group of seven double exposures prints that reverberate across separate panels like the waves crashing just outside Ando’s observatory, initiating a visual dialogue larger than the sum of its parts. In Bajo el Sol Azul, the artist translates the curvature and contemplative experience of the physical space reconnecting the concrete structure of the observatory to the sky it was designed to observe. Deep blues and misty gradients of light only hint at the structure within, allowing the void of space beyond to invite reflection. Lastly, a series of Polaroid prints also made at Casa Wabi, shown for the first time, capture the influence of the Light & Space and Constructivism art movements in Menchelli’s contemporary practice.
You can visit the exhibition online at this link:
UNDER the BLUE SUN.
