Dillon Chapman on Arlene Mejorado, Part 2
Curtain to the Crater, Porter Ranch, California, 2023, inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
[Image description: An image of a sheer white curtain hung from a stand in front of a view of the San Fernando Valley.]
I’ve had the privilege of writing about Arlene Mejorado’s work for HereIn before. In 2021, I covered a series of photographs she made spanning 2020-2021, titled Breathing Exteriors: (re)Placements of Memory.“For Mejorado,” I wrote, “the archive is a site of play. She writes over the original archive in making these new images, interpolating them and giving them a new context in which to be viewed. In doing so she questions authorship and agency, as the images are now seen through her own lens.” I have the pleasure of writing about Mejorado’s smart and beautiful images again, this time a body of work under the banner of a landscape holds you still. In this new series, shot over the past three months, she expands upon the palimpsestic nature of the archive, and brings performance, documentary, and installation into the production of these new photographs, reaching back towards her more photojournalistic work, but also forward to an iconic and distinct style that is emotionally arresting, tender, and generous. These new works delve deeper into her family’s archives, feature new collaborations with family members (and friends who serve as stand-ins) of all ages and generations, and examine the landscape of the San Fernando Valley. While these are all still-image works, there is a rich, cinematic quality to them that comes from careful staging, thoughtful direction, and the warm quality of analog film.
Scenes of an Inner Life, San Fernando Valley, California, 2023, inkjet print on transparency film, 90 x 40 in.
[Image description: An image of a backlit curtain of eight distinct transparent images arranged horizontally and repeated vertically, to create a filmstrip pattern.This curtain hangs in front of a large industrial window in a space with concrete floors.]
These new photographs can be grouped into a few categories: curtains, landscapes, the archive, and portraits. I will organize my analysis of Mejorado’s work around these loose identifications in the hopes that I can articulate the connecting threads that weave among them. In Curtains to the Crater, Porter Ranch, California (2023), we are presented with an obscured view of the San Fernando Valley—a sheer white curtain with floral embroidery functions as a membrane between the viewer and the Valley, hung from a stand like a portrait studio backdrop. Here Mejorado is both revealing and concealing something intimate. This curtain is reminiscent of the vinyl banners depicting images from her family’s archives, but this image is inverted, the site becoming the focus, yet slightly obscured through the translucent curtain. For those familiar with the view, they have a unique insight into the photograph, but for those of us unfamiliar, we cannot fully see past the delicate lace facade. This use of the curtain crops up repeatedly in Mejorado’s new body of work, and includes a curtain of images titled Scenes of an Inner Life, San Fernando Valley, California (2023), which comprises eight color film positives repeatedly printed vertically on a transparency sheet and hung in front of a window, backlit. This curtain is a departure from the curtains as backdrops in other photographs while also being a callback to the vinyl banners of her previous work, the images repeated in an almost textile-like pattern. They are a combination of archival birthday-party footage, the artist’s mother photographed from behind, and other domestic scenes. The repeating pattern of the images also mimics an analog film strip (either for still or moving images). Again, intimacy is presented and withheld. We are given incredibly personal imagery, but without the context to situate ourselves within it, we are left to project our own memories and feelings onto them. Mejorado plays into the unknowable nature of the archive; images in particular can be de- and re-contextualized over and over again. Time becomes both circular and collapsed.
Scenes of an Inner Life, San Fernando Valley, California (detail), 2023, inkjet print on transparency film, 90 x 40. in.
[Image description: A detail shot of the transparent images, showing us from left to right: the chandelier in a dining room with wood paneling, a scene from a party with a man and woman dancing under pink streamers and a girl behind them holding a green ball, the back of a woman standing in front of pool, and the edge of a sepia toned outdoor scene.]
These categories into which I am grouping Mejorado’s images are intentionally loose—they overlap and intersect at various points. Almost all of the images could be placed into any of these groups, but I have selected the most obvious, and of course, the ones that feel particularly compelling to me as a viewer. As a category, landscape undergirds this whole project. Mejorado is careful about what she chooses to show us of the San Fernando Valley as land/urbanscape, such as in Where the Los Angeles River Begins, Canoga Park, California (2023). Here we see the concrete infrastructure that imposes itself on the landscape, and where manmade and natural meet. The river barely covers the concrete bottom, and dirt and algae are visible. This contrasts with the tall concrete peninsula. In the background the stands and lights of a sports stadium are visible next to green foliage. This duality is further explored in Sun, Colors, and Textures of the Valley, Northridge, California (2023). While Where the River Begins is an almost survey-esque photograph, Sun, Colors, and Textures is a formal study, akin to a Color Field painting. The concrete, the painted cement blocks, the blue of the sky, and the shadow of the tree give us a sense of the blazing heat of the sun in the Valley. This is an urban desert. Mejorado is setting the stage, giving us more context for the images that were made during her childhood (and now). We need to understand this landscape if we are to immerse ourselves in this metamorphic archive.
Where the Los Angeles River Begins, Canoga Park, California, 2023, inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
[Image description: An image of a concrete riverbed that forks in two directions, with trees and the lights of a sports stadium behind it.The water barely covers the riverbed.]
Sun, Colors, and Textures of the Valley, Northridge, California, 2023, inkjet print 30 x 24 in.
[Image description: An image of a tree, casting a dark shadow on yellow and terra cotta-colored cinder block wall with iron bars on top.]
In Handling a Mother’s Archive #1 and Handling a Mother’s Archive #2, Mejorado gives us a more direct look at the archive. In both of these images we see various family photos, presented in front of a floral bedsheet (a chain link fence just visible behind the cloth) by the artist’s cousins. These are reminiscent of Mejorado’s earlier work, and give us the most familiar sense of the family archive: looking at old images of loved ones (or people we may not even know but to whom we are connected by blood or some other means).The setting is unclear, but the bedsheet lends a domesticity, a comfort to the image. This is a conversation through various generations, as it is clear that three distinct groups exist in the production of these images (Mejorado, her cousins, and the other family members in the photographs being handled). Borrowing from this earlier method, she is now incorporating performance more directly into the process of creating the images, involving other people to create these intimate tableaus. The use of the archive is not singular in this project, though, and Mejorado implicates herself in these images in various ways, such as in Bedroom Backdrop Behind Storefront Glass, Winnetka, California (2023), where we see a reflection of her while making this image. She layers temporalities, continuing to refuse us the intimate details that we may long to see in such personal work. Therein lies the universality of Mejorado’s practice. The specificity is important, and it is that specificity that opens the work up to a broad viewership, yet we are not given autobiographical details that are too private, too intimate. Those details are for her and her family.
Handling a Mother’s Archive #1, Winnetka Park, California and Handling a Mother’s Archive #2, Winnetka Park, California, both 2023, inkjet prints, 20 x 16 in. each
[Image description: (left) An image of a child’s hands holding a photograph of a woman in front of white backdrop with floral embroidered detail. (right) An image of two children holding several images of various women in front of a white backdrop with floral embroidered detail.]
Bedroom Backdrop Behind Storefront Glass, Winnetka, California, 2023, inkjet print 30 x 24 in.
[Image description: An image of a bedroom behind a window, with a passerby and the photographer reflected in the glass.]
The last grouping of images—portraits—are really the centerpoint of the whole project. This body of work is just as much about people as it is about landscapes. How people, like our environment, shape us. In I Remember Drawing on my Father’s Back with a Ballpoint Pen, Somewhere in Los Angeles (2023), Mejorado and her friend, Freddy Martinez, recreate a memory from the artist’s youth, drawing on her father’s back in an act of intimacy. This scene is staged outside in the heat of the Valley, to acknowledge the shift in her relationship with her father during his time unhoused, when they had to meet in public spaces, and how the private became public, while the public became private. Mejorado is fabricating memories that were not imaged, staging them so that they may be fixed as photographs as a way of contributing to this ever changing archive that has become the focal point of her art practice. The use of her friend to stand in for her father speaks to the complexity of their relationship (her and her father’s), but also the way in which kinship bleeds out into those around us. The family is, for many of us, our crucible, shaping us into who we are. The archive shows us echoes of the past, allowing them to reverberate through time, and how we become versions of our loved ones (and perhaps relatives that we’ve never even met).
I Remember Drawing on my Father’s Back with a Ballpoint Pen, Somewhere in Los Angeles, 2023, inkjet print 30 x 24 in.
[Image description: An image of a shirtless man with dark, curly hair, facing away from the camera and having a design drawn on his back with a blue pen by a pair of hands with a red bracelet.]
Perhaps it is fitting then, to end with My Mother Standing in a Pool and Re-embodying her Childhood Photograph at a Beach in Mexico, North Hills, California (2023), the most formal portrait out of the whole group of images I have discussed. We again see the curtain motif, along with the landscape, in this re-performance of the archive. This is the first time that the artist has photographed her mother directly, and I feel, as a viewer and avid fan of Mejorado’s work, that the entirety of her practice can be distilled down to this image. Her mother is the embodied archive through which she accesses the past and collaborates on the present with. The artist’s mother is regal, both classically and contemporarily beautiful, the Venus of the San Fernando Valley.
My Mother Standing in a Pool and Re-embodying her Childhood Photograph at a Beach in Mexico, North Hills, California, 2023, inkjet print, 30 x 24 in.
[Image description: An image of a woman with brown hair in a black, one-piece bathing suit standing in a pool and in front of a white curtain hung on a gate, a shadow cast on the fabric. Cars and houses are visible outside of the gate.]
It is difficult to encapsulate all of the complexities of such a prolific artist. All of the photographs in this new project are worthy of contemplation, but I am bound by space and word count. Mejorado has mastered the art of the punctum, piercing her viewers with every photograph. The warm tones of these analog images makes it nearly impossible to parse out the past and the present, instead presenting a melding of the two that feels poetic yet honest. The artist is both generous and withholding, a combination befitting the intimacy and complexity of the work she is imaging. These photographs, like the people, places, and memories she is recording and rewriting, will continue to change through time. As stated by Mejorado herself, the archive is a palimpsest. Her practice has expanded beyond the simple act of re-photographing—crafting images, creating sets, collaborating with performers. Mejorado is a director, and the photographs in this series read like stills from various scenes in a film. And, like a truly beloved film, you’ll want to look at these photographs over and over again.
Dillon Chapman—an artist, writer, and cultural critic—is HereIn’s Contributing Editor.