Fabiola Menchelli: Parallax Helio

"I think of drawing constantly while I'm working to make the images, opening up my understanding of what photography is and can be. In Parallax, I created black-and-white photograms using round, translucent objects, multiple exposures, and solarization. The objects were translated into shadows' flat echoes, creating new circular forms that multiply on the paper. The resulting images felt cosmic. They presented proof of elusive and fleeting moments in which things aligned, and they reference-yet at the same time challenge-a constructed reality." - Fabiola Menchelli

The primary focus of the exhibition are ten unique photograms by Fabiola Menchelli made on copper plates through the 19^th-century heliogravure process. Unlike photographs composed through the viewfinder of a camera in the field, photograms are created in the studio by carefully arranging objects over the photo-sensitive paper in near-total darkness. Only Menchelli's pre-visualization and technical experience can coax the latent image from the shadows of her darkroom. In this way, her process is more akin to collage or sculpture than to traditional photography; One is more likely to find Menchelli in a hazmat suit and gas mask than toting a camera bag and tripod. 

On a visual level, the works on view appear as graphic representations of astronomy, a theme explored in earlier series by the artist including Bajo el Sol Azul (Under the Blue Sun, 2017) exhibited at Marshall Gallery in 2022. However, in this new series, celestial bodies and glowing circles of light are generated by Menchelli in the darkroom through the manipulation of translucent objects, eclipsing one another in conjunction with photography's foundational elements of accident and chance. Multiple exposures and solarization techniques further exaggerate the experimental effects. The artist never sees the fruit of this choreographed labor until after the development and fixing processes have stabilized the exposure and it can be brought into the light for viewing. The writer Laura Orozco, a curator and the Director of ESPAC in Mexico City, interestingly notes that by this process of delayed gratification "Menchelli puts herself in the same site as the viewer, causing a delayering of the values and functions between the creator, the consumer and the object". Menchelli then transmutes the photograms to copper plates through the laborious technique of heliogravure. 

The first and arguably finest mechanical means of photo-reproduction, the heliogravure or "photogravure" process was made famous through the volumes of Camera Work and pioneering artists such as Henry Fox Talbot, Edward S. Curtis, Alfred Stieglitz, and Anne Brigman, among many others as the process gained artistic prominence during the Pictorialism movement at the turn of the 20^th century. This period saw the wider acceptance of photography as an artistic practice capable of subjective expression beyond its more rigid foundation as a tool of science for objective recordings. The process uses an acid-bath to etch an image, in this case Menchelli's photograms, into the surface of a copper plate leaving a highly detailed photographic relief. These plates are inked and pressed to produce richly toned intaglio prints though, in line with her atypical approach to the medium, Menchelli is exhibiting the copper plates as one-of-a-kind photographic objects. Produced in collaboration with the celebrated Mexican printmaking studio, El Taller de Mike, the plates radiate her abstract compositions showcasing expert craftsmanship of the highest archival quality. 

Beneath the surface, Menchelli's work is fundamentally concerned with exploring alternative modes of observation, dissolving the normative boundaries of artistic practice, and questioning accepted histories within photography and thus society at large. In regards to the "Parallax" pieces on view, these themes are explored through the metaphor of gravitational lens distortion as the series statement clarifies: "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 the way that a black hole might obscure the perception of distant galaxies, the photogram's collapsing of space and voids of formal information in Menchelli's new work can invite myriad interpretations of their origin and significance. This skillful use and malleable reimagination of traditional photographic processes exemplifies Menchelli's increasingly ambitious output.