© 2025 WLRN
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Hazmat suits, chemicals and darkness: Artist gets 'inside the camera' to create abstract photography

Norton Museum's Artist-in-Residence, Mexican artist Fabiola Menchelli, presents her abstract solo exhibition, certain silence, which features hand-molded photographs that the raise questions about human obsession with certainty and risk and challenges our understanding of photography.
Fabiola Menchelli
Norton Museum's Artist-in-Residence, Mexican artist Fabiola Menchelli, presents her abstract solo exhibition, certain silence, which features hand-molded photographs that the raise questions about human obsession with certainty and risk and challenges our understanding of photography.

Hazmat suits, gloves, a respirator — Fabiola Menchelli needs all of it to handmake her large format art.

For her new certain silence project, the artist from Mexico City worked with toxic color chemicals — inside a completely dark photographic room, relying on touch and sound to guide her movements — to create, manipulate and develop haunting, abstract photographic prints.

The new exhibit, now on display at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, examines risk-taking in the art of photography.

"It's making photography through darkness, which is kind of like being inside of the camera and working directly on the negative or inside of the camera working between the lens and the photosensitive material," said Menchelli, who is the museum's new artist-in-residence.

READ MORE: A 30-foot bear. A 20-foot Birkin bag. This year’s Art Palm Beach is going big

She explained to WLRN that by doing most of her art in complete darkness she is challenging human obsession with certainty and risk.

“ There is this relationship to darkness that has to do with silence. Has to do with meditation, a state of mind,” Menchelli said. “The not knowing what's going to happen in the dark room when I go in — being okay with not knowing what's going to happen.”

Creative process

Fabiola Menchelli said she works with light-sensitive paper in complete darkness, which is in contrast to traditional photographic darkrooms where a red “safelight” — which doesn't damage film — is used to guide the work.

" I cancel the sense of sight. So all of the other senses become really acute," Menchelli said.

To make her art, she has to put on a yellow hazmat suit, gloves and a respirator to keep her protected from the toxic chemicals.

During the creative process, she preps the room by cutting off the light prior to grabbing specialized darkroom photographic paper, which are typically glossy, resin-coated sheets.

She then exposes the photographic paper to light under an equipment called an enlarger — essentially a projector that pushes light through a negative to create an enlarged image onto the photographic paper material.

She folds the paper and then “exposes it with different color filters and develops it with a chemical bath" — that includes dipping the paper in various preservatives and chemical solutions.

She also uses traditional photographic techniques such as 'dodging' and 'burning' — which lighten and darken parts of images — to help adjust exposure or manipulate tones like shadows and highlights.

'Breaking tradition'

Lauren Richman, curator of photography at the Norton Museum, said what drew her to Menchelli’s work is her "interest in breaking tradition."

 "The history of photography is so tied to tradition and sort of conservative viewpoints in terms of being very precise, being a perfectionist," Richman told WLRN. "And Fabiola is really pushing the boundaries of that kind of thought process."

Richman said, in a world of limitless access to digital photos, the exhibition draws people into the process of physically making photographs.

“ It'll be interesting for people who have never been in a dark room before or thought about analog photography,” Richman said. “And really think about how they are made with photography's base elements, which is light, chemistry, and darkness.”

But there is a yin-yang aspect to Menchelli's residency. The artist said she also plans to do some experiments with lumen prints, which exposes photographic paper to the sunlight.
This is Menchelli’s first solo museum exhibition. Her residency includes a series of adult workshops.

IF YOU GO
What: certain silence at the Norton Museum of Art
When: Now through March 23, 2025
Where: 1450 S Dixie Hwy, West Palm Beach, FL 33401Information: More details here.

Keep up with South Florida's arts and culture scene by signing up for The A/C newsletter. Every Wednesday, the A/C will offer a curation of stories and deep dives that celebrate South Florida's arts community. Click here to subscribe.

Wilkine Brutus is the Palm Beach County Reporter for WLRN. The award-winning journalist produces stories on topics surrounding local news, culture, art, politics and current affairs. Contact Wilkine at wbrutus@wlrnnews.org
More On This Topic