I carry all the names I’m given
Fabiola Menchelli’s work investigates essential ideas about photography through the language of abstraction. Using light as raw material, her work explores photography as a poetic space, using a wide variety of contemporary strategies and experimental techniques ranging from analog to digital practices. From phe- nomenology to astronomy, her work seeks to expand the meaning of observing, to expand our perception beyond the limits of our own body in the infinite hopeful attempt to understand our existence.
“There is a conscious distance from the massive and immediate use of photography and the image in Menchelli’s practice. Most of her works come from analog methodologies used mainly during the invention of the medium, which entails a prolonged time and an almost artisanal approach, intertwined with scientific knowledge. The pieces in the series I carry all the names I’m given allude to the basis of photography: the recording of light on a sensitive material. Here, the artist folds and unfolds the color photosensitive paper in the darkroom and exposes it to different temporalities of light, which on its way to its final destination passes through a color filter. [...] In the darkroom, Menchelli sees the image she is creating only at the moment of de- velopment and fixation, not before. Photography is created blindly, from an almost elusive interaction between memory and the sense of touch.”–Laura Orozco. Curated from her most recent body of work I carry all the names I’m given, Fabiola Menchelli will present an installation of new folded, sculptural color works made for the a ppr oc he salon.
Fabiola Menchelli received an MFA in Photography and Visual Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has exhibited work in recent solo and group shows in the U.S.A., the U.K., Mexico, France and Dubai, among others. Menchelli has participated in numerous artist residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Casa Wabi, and teaches at universities across North America. She received the Fulbright–García Robles Fellowship (2011) and the Prize of Acquisition of the XVI Mexican Photography Biennial (2014).