Fabiola Menchelli

Artist Statement

 

I am interested in the way photography is able to expand the limits of our own perception and understanding of this world, amplifying and collapsing the distance between our bodies, the solar system and an atom. I find it fascinating how human curiosity constantly innovates to expand and contract consciousness and understanding. I am always amazed when an experiment in the studio can create this distance and connect the photograph to a bigger deeper universe as it starts to make sense.

My work investigates essential ideas about photography through the language of abstraction. I find fertile ground in the conversation between photography and other mediums like painting, drawing, sculpture and new media, where questions open to new ways of seeing. I am heavily invested in the materiality of the image, using light as the central axis, I apply a wide variety of contemporary strategies and experimental techniques that range from analog to digital practices. My creative process is based on visual experimentation, using intuition to question the way we perceive and seek to create poetic sense in the image. 

My research explores phenomenology, perception, and our relationship with the representation of space in the images. I find it indispensable to question the ways in which we perceive reality, as well as the ways in which technology influences and transforms our perception and interpretation of the world. Is it possible to expand the reality in which we live by modifying our perception of it? Can images serve as agents to expand perception? Can the material alchemy of art increase the will to see deeper and change our perception of the world?

The relationship between the camera and the brain in my work is intrinsically related to the way we perceive the world. By using multiple exposures, I construct images that transform the physical reality and create a space that exists only as a photographic image, Projecting the interior space of the camera, translating three-dimensional space into the bi-dimensional plane of photography to question the way in which we perceive the world and allow the work to open to the interpretation of the observer.

The medium in my work is light recorded onto paper. In the studio, I use very simple materials that have an essential relationship to photography: paper, light, and glass, to create the compositions, which point to the essential aspects of the photographic medium. I attempt to construct images that distance themselves from the objects that made them, though photograms or multiple exposures using paper or glass to block or reflect light which is then recorded onto the photosensitive surface.

The work relies heavily on the relationship between photography and truth, as its intrinsic relationship to reality. In order for a photograph to exist, there needs to be a 'real' thing in front of the camera to be photographed. However, my work uses this relationship to create a distance - by way of abstraction - from the object that was photographed to the image that is created. The reference of the materials used to construct the image is abstracted through its form, and the image created opens up, becoming a proof of an idea that is in its essence invisible. Like a metaphor, the object is translated into a different medium and its form opens in its meaning.

The image in my work represents a proof of something that is not visible to our human eyes, as the evidence that it can only truly be experienced by the senses. The work tries to give the viewer proof of something that is essential and invisible, but implicitly real. In other words, the image itself functions as a proof of the existence of meaning, that is elusive and fleeting, but grounded in one harmonic photographic moment where everything aligns, referencing and challenging at the same time a constructed reality.

I am interested in laborious processes that allow me to experiment with a variety of photographic techniques. Most recently I am interested in the photogram as a mode of constructing images that explore a direct relationship between the object and the photographic surface. The object placed on top of the silver gelatin paper is exposed to light, creating a latent image that is later revealed through the development process in the darkroom. I experiment with different techniques, including multiple exposures and solarizations to challenge the materiality of the image generating relationships between the surface of the paper and the shadow of the objects.

Using abstraction as an open language, the work exposes the materiality of the light. My work seeks to expand the meaning in relation to a broad range of disciplines. From phenomenology and psychology to astronomy and optics, my work attempts to point to the larger meaning of looking-not only at the medium itself, but at the ways in which we are able to observe ourselves and the cosmos, expanding our vision beyond the limits of bodies and exploring outer space as well as an atom to try to understand our existence.