“When an idea takes shape, could the risk represented by it alone awaken in one a different connection with what we commonly call reality?” – Anne Dufourmantelle (2019) In Praise of Risk

Dark Moves is a series of cameraless images that rethinks the nature of photographic representation. By rejecting the perspectival optical mediation, these images invite us to contemplate photography not as a capture through a lens, but as a creation of its own. In this context, a photograph without a camera is not the representation of the object but is the object itself.

The work proposes an internal work, inside the darkroom where blindness manifests itself, the possibilities of uncertainty and memory resurface through touch. Menchelli works in complete darkness using photographic paper as a support and tool to make the image, which she later mounts on stainless steel structures that are folded following the exact folds of each image. The result is photographic works that occupy space in a three-dimensional way, challenging the conventional idea of photography as a two-dimensional medium. Dark Moves is characterized by its focus on the intersection between the body, light, and the photographic image, exploring new expressive possibilities within the medium; and generating an immersive space for the viewer.

This series was presented at The Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, at Reed College, and Arroniz Galería, Mexico City

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

I Carry All the Names I am Given, the title of Fabiola Menchelli’s solo show at the Arróniz gallery, 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 its opposites: negative and positive, visible and invisible, real and fiction, digital and analog, liquid and solid, etc.

This exhibition’s 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, rigorous but imperfect, favors the deconstruction of its own system and expected functionality.

The photograms take various scales about 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

The title of this work is an excerpt from the poem “A Piece of Writing that won me $200 in eighth grade” written by the artist and writer Manuel Arturo Abreu. See at: https://humanparts.medium.com/a-piece-of-writing-that-won-me-200-in-eighth-grade-56a27855d0d6

The title of this body of work, Meian No Oku, 明暗 の 奥  means The depth of light and darkness. Influenced by her travel to Japan, Menchelli started working with color photograms in 2020. This process requires to work in complete darkness where certain things can be planned but others are left to chance, allowing space for improvisation. The color photograms are created with pieces of translucent paper, using multiple exposures of colored light to construct an intuitive space inside of the images. In the darkroom time is paused and the distance becomes personal, measuring space with the tips of her fingers, choreographing movements using colored filters to expose the photographic paper. Working with light as a substance she comes to terms with its matter, creating depth through shadow and light to reveal the subtle revolutions that occur through contemplation.

She works in a small format in the darkroom and later uses these photograms as negatives expanding their scale. This allows for the invisible structure of the photographic paper to be expanded revealing its texture in a micro scale. To take a step closer and observe the weaving of photography’s mechanisms and understand vision in a physical way.

Knowledge takes the form of a moving spiral. As described by Ortega y Gasset the growth of knowledge is the process of digging away at the inwardness of things in the attempt to fulfill the ultimate, hopeless task of bringing it to light. We observe the cosmos and, trying to understand ourselves in its infinite depth, it looks back at us. Brushing its contours, we look for meaning in the dark. Balancing sense and reason, insight comes to us like lightning, in a moment of simultaneous illumination and blindness.

In optics and astronomy, a parallax effect describes an angular deviation of the apparent position of an object, which depends on the location of the observer. In this body of work, the cameraless images begin in the darkroom as photograms, allowing for the contours of objects to be recorded through light on the surface of photosensitive paper. Through additional exposures and solarization, an imagined composition is translated into a layered construction, introducing elements of chance into the image-making process. The scale of the resulting image is amplified, further exaggerating the distance between the object and its representation, simultaneously pushing and pulling our sense of perception.

We come back to the beginning of the spiral, to the point where knowledge and creation are reflections intertwined. Inwardness as such allows us to confront the impossible depth of objects. It executes itself and arrives as an intimate reflection—an image looking back at us, touching us, facing us with immensity.

Immensely grateful to everyone that supported me and the creation of this work for the past three years. Thank you to Alex, Laura, and Javier from ProxyCo Gallery. Thank you to FocoLab and to LTI/Lightside for their incredible help in producing this show. Thank you to all the people that helped me in the studio at different points, Emily Kind, M Prull, Paul McAllister, Carla González Vergara, and Darinka Lama. To Priscila Vaneuville, Tere Carter, and my beautiful family, thank you for being there high and low. Special thank you to all the brilliant people that helped me articulate this project, Kevin Sweet, Laura Orozco, Beatriz Díaz, and my students.

This project would not be possible if not for the generous support of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores del Arte from Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in México. Thank you.

The series is a body of work created in response to and in collaboration with the work of Leslie Moody-Castro and Daniela Libertado for the exhibition A Grain in the Eye of the Mountain at the MARSO Foundation in 2019. The show explored the poetic possibilities of our works and their relation to a series of conversation developments. We talked about the container as a symbol that unfolds the materiality of the work.

This series of works was created using the velvet edge of a 35mm photographic film container. The horizon in the images is generated by the velvet edge of the photographic film magazine. In the darkroom, I enlarged the images using color filters in front of the lens to build a space with multiple color exposures.

I’m interested in the poetics of the edge, the horizon, the limit, and the container. The work unfolds from the photographic materiality, also generating a landscape, and in turn reminds me of the blink of an eye. I like to think these pieces remind us how powerful it is to take a step back and observe ourselves, observing.

Using the camera to transmute reality, Fabiola Menchelli combines diverse perspectives in a single plane, generating a dimension that exists only within the camera. The images from this body of work are constructed inside the camera exposing the light-sensitive surface multiple times altering the object, shapes, and colors, thus generating different planes of light combined in the latent image.

The work reveals the subjectivity of the lens by conceiving the camera as a perceptual apparatus that points inside to create the image. Seeking to question the ontological nature of the photographic medium to elevate the space of representation beyond the paradigms of perception.

Fabiola Menchelli, Parallax, 2016, Archival pigment print on fiber paper, 30″ x 40” / 70 x 100 cm[/caption]

Under the Blue Sun originated during Fabiola Menchelli’s 2015 residency at Casa Wabi, a Tadao Ando-designed residential compound for artists situated near Puerto Escondido, along the Oaxacan coast of Mexico. An observatory on the premises, intended by Ando as a site for deep contemplation, became Menchelli’s source of inspiration for a new body of work about the poetics of observation.

Over the course of 28 days, Menchelli photographed the shifting light that slipped into the observatory’s imposing, concrete structure. Capturing the rhythmic, cyclical shifts of the sun across multiple exposures, she began to transpose the physical dimensionality of the architecture into immeasurable space. The resulting images were printed with a 170-year-old photographic process called cyanotype, reproducing the rough, uneven curves of the observatory walls with a technique that’s notoriously difficult to control. Quite literally drawing with light, these new works were informed by the same wabi-sabi philosophy that inspired the building itself, one that embraces the imperfect and transient elements found in nature.

Menchelli presents ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ not only as spatial elements but also as temporal dimensions. By unifying multiple exposures, she blurs the boundaries between the observatory’s solid edge and the vast, impenetrable sky. The overlapping layers of blue tonalities metaphorically fold in upon one another, adding a depth and richness that both abstracts the spaces depicted and the time in, during, and over which they were captured. By removing the clear visual referents via which one might more easily read or understand the image, Menchelli manipulates our own perceptive powers in order to complete the work.

In 1838, John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype, captured one of his earliest images through a circular window: that of a telescope belonging to his father, the renowned astronomer William Herschel. Somehow the act of looking beyond — of collapsing space and distance through the manipulation of our organs of perception and our sensory experience — also too creates a circular path linking Herschel, Ando, and Menchelli. Each one looks beyond and then ultimately back, to reflect on the nature of the very thing they seek to capture. Through science, architecture, and photography their works speak not only to light and the spaces that it illuminates but to the subtle revolutions we experience as the result of profound contemplation.

Under the Blue Sun is presented as two cycles of seven images and in this way, Menchelli too comes full circle. Each image, through its imperfect curves and asymmetrical forms, reveals an experience captured in order to eventually be continued by others. Their multiplicity and the ever so subtle variations across repetitions amplifies each image’s own subjectivity, echoing the simple realization that a finished product is always still a
work in progress.

— Asha Bukojemsky

Ellipse is a series of abstract photographs created in May 2015, taken inside a concrete observatory, and formed by multiple exposures within the camera.

The series embodies a composition of light, shapes, shadows, lines, and forces. The expression, not only through a single picture but also as a whole, is the result of various elements; the materials, the light, the shadow, the edge of the concrete, the air, the ocean, and the horizon all work as an influence on the creative process.

The purpose is to create from one image to another, a spiral in motion. Shapes, circles, ellipses, and movements are organic and energetic; forces in contact with each other. Showing intangible ideas can be felt and connected through what awakens in each person. Geometry, as space and a source of inspiration, generates images open to interpretation for the observer. However, it is inevitable to perceive the strength they have when they combine and create a greater space.

The series seeks to awaken a reflection on the bond between human beings; and how a stronger space is constructed in community, the same way an image meets another sibling image, and they connect.

Blueprints was commissioned for the exhibition “Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Photographic Explorations through Mexican Photography”, curated by Irving Dominguez with the support of Museo Universitario del Chopo and Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

This project sought to invert the relationship between photography and architecture and return the museum’s building to its original space as a blueprint. Over a month, I climbed the towers at the Chopo Museum in Mexico City, registering the shadow of the structure onto cyanotypes. The work intended to reconnect architecture and photography, returning the building to its conceptual state through a poetic gesture that speaks about space in relation to time.