Dillon Chapman on Arlene Mejorado

Mother Madonna, 2020, Reseda, CA, inkjet print, 21 x 32 in.

[Image description: An image of a dilapidated building with white criss crossing wood detail. In the center of the image is a vinyl banner of an analog photograph of a woman with dark curly hair in black shorts, a black shirt, and a white jacket. A telephone pole and line is visible behind the house.]

In the photographs of artist Arlene Mejorado, a current graduate student at UCSD, the archive is a window to reimagine the past, ground oneself in the present, and look toward the future. Her recent body of work, Breathing Exteriors: re-Placements of Memory, features images that are constructed through printing family photographs on vinyl banners, re-placing the banners in the place in which the original photograph was taken, and composing a new image. The images feature Mejorado, her mother, and other family members, and are selected collaboratively through conversations with them. These are not the photographs that hang on the wall around your home, but the photos that are stored lovingly in a box and kept under the bed: they represent memories, not milestones (such as school pictures or photos of a wedding), often of relatively unextraordinary events. Influenced heavily by Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory, Deanna Ledezma's Regarding Family Photography in Contemporary Latinx Art, Sarah Dillon's Reinscribing De Quincey's palimpsest: the significance of the palimpsest in contemporary literary and cultural studies, and Saidiya Hartman’s writing on photography, Mejorado works as a photographic archaeologist, returning these mementos to their origin point in an effort to recontextualize them for herself. 

It would be a mistake to read this project as an exercise in nostalgia. While nostalgia is often a longing to return to a site, to a memory, Mejorado’s images do just that, and, by juxtaposing these photographs taken nearly three decades ago with the current reality of those sites, she counters the fetishization of the past. She doesn’t want to return to the past, nor does she aim to memorialize the locations in which the photographs were originally taken. Mejorado re-frames them as a way of exerting her own agency, and asking us to look at these images on her terms, not the terms of the original photographer(s). Her images keep us at arm’s length, a haunting refusal— we aren’t given the context of the original photographs or a family history as a narrative entry. The inkjet prints of these images feature the original photograph-turned-vinyl banner at roughly the same scale as the typical 4x6 or 5x7 print one would find in a standard family photo album. There is a material change and contextual shift, yet the scale remains almost the same. Mejorado understands the limitations of image-making, she knows that what a photograph can say without text is limited, and uses that to make room for herself and her viewers.

Children’s Party, 2021, Reseda, CA, inkjet print, 21 x 32 in.

[Image description: An image of an alley with various fences: chain link, wooden, cement block. In the center of the image is a vinyl banner of an analog photograph of a children’s birthday party, in which the children are gathered beneath a piñata while one child swings at it. Houses and telephone lines are visible around the alley.]

These images depart from Mejorado’s previous work as a photojournalist for various publications, including The Atlantic and Vogue. Documentary photography is bound by certain conventions: a photojournalist is not meant to intervene or stage an image. There is also the emphasis on a narrative trajectory; photojournalism is fundamentally about a visual narrative that guides the viewer through the story with which they are being presented. Mejorado's Breathing Exteriors refuses these conventions by deconstructing the narratives around the original images. She is aware that photographs are always a surface for a viewer to project their own memories onto, and gives us room to relate to her images while also thinking about our own relationship to the family archive. The refusal of narrative can be a very generous strategy for an artist to employ. These images are just as much for Mejorado as they are for her viewers.

Traditionally, "palimpsest" refers to a text in which older writing has been erased to make room for new writing. The erasure is not complete, though, with bits of the old text peeking through the new. A palimpsest could be thought of as antithetical to nostalgia. It acknowledges that nothing is concrete and our thoughts, feelings, and understanding shift over the course of time. The same can be said for photographs. Our relationship to images is not static. New images that we encounter are influenced by older images we have already seen, and intaking new images changes how we view older images. We are constantly engaged with a kind of intertextual reading and Mejorado’s photographs make room for that. By refusing to give us a narrative, she gives us the potential to have a shifting relationship to these images. Photography and writing are often paired together, but at times this is a less than ideal relationship. A fixed narrative removes the possibility for an ongoing relationship with images.

Ana’s Apartment, 2021, Winnetka, CA, inkjet print, 21 x 32 in.

[Image description: An image of the outside of a stucco and cement building . In the center of the image is a vinyl banner of an analog photograph of a woman with dark hair and a black shirt in a bedroom with a dresser with various odds and ends atop it. The banner is hung on a blue rod iron fence that has razor wire strung along the top.]

A photograph is not merely an image, it is also often an object. Mejorado emphasizes this dynamic by printing the old analog photos that, as vinyl banners, serve as the center-points to these new images. This practice of photographing photographs as image-objects is not new— they are reminiscent of Zoe Leonard’s work (such as New York Harbor I, 2016). To photograph an image is to reference its materiality. And while there are similarities between Mejorado and Leonard’s photographs, Mejorado composes a stage set for us, while Leonard’s images are solely focused on the material quality of the photographs. Mejorado is playing with memory and place— the sites take up the majority of the composition, giving both the photograph and the viewer some breathing room. Your eye is drawn to the central part of the image but is allowed to wander and look at the differences laid bare. The site and the vinyl banners are dependent on one another to complicate the meaning of the original photograph. 

Just as the site is important to the development of these photographs, an in-person experience of these images is necessary. To be in the same room as these prints is to feel the tenderness and generosity of the images. In a time in which so many things— photographs in particular— are experienced digitally, there are still things that must be experienced in real space. The scale of the vinyl banners in the inkjet prints evokes the tactility through which the images are created. This tactile experience is shown to the viewer, but it is not extended— we can’t touch the banners. That is for Mejorado alone, and as a viewer I appreciate the refusal. The analog photo that is central to these images is a twofold simulacrum: the banner is an image of the photograph, and the inkjet print is an image of the banner. We can never touch the original, but the original is not the point. The banner itself suggests a non-archival image: something that can and will fade over time.

Swimming Pool, 2021, North Hills, CA, inkjet print, 21 x 32 in.

[Image description: An image of an empty community swimming pool. In the center of the image is a vinyl banner of an analog photograph of a young girl with dark hair swimming in a pool. A chain link fence and palm trees are visible around the pool.]

An archive is not a mausoleum. It is not a memorial. To treat an archive as a static collection of images/objects/texts is to place it outside of meaning, to assert that the meaning is intrinsic and immutable. Things that are treated as immutable are often lost, or at least their meaning is lost as the context disappears. To be an archaeologist is to re-construct the past, but that past is always filtered through the lens of the present, which makes it at best a misrepresentation and at worst a lie. Mejorado’s photographs seek to re-visit, not re-construct the past. In Patrick Staff’s film The Foundation (2015), which focuses on the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, the archive of Tom’s work is not separate from the house in which the stewards live. The drawings are just as part of the house as anything else there, so they are not kept in the conditions of a typical archive. Like everything else, they are allowed to decay. The archive is something tactile, sensual, and meant to be handled. The meaning of the work and the upkeep of the archive is a collective effort. To handle the drawings without gloves is to change and eventually destroy them, which is precisely what the men in the house and the guests do. To handle the drawings is to acknowledge the mutability of the archive. This sentiment is echoed in Mejorado’s transmutation of the analog prints into vinyl banners. They are not meant to live forever, and now both the original photographs and the new inkjet prints reside in separate but similar boxes in her studio. 

Breathing Exteriors: re-Placements of Memory, 2021, installation view

[Image description: An image of the inside of an art gallery with cement floors, white walls, and exposed pipes. Several photographs are hung at eye level by silver pins, each of them depicting a different location with a corresponding vinyl banner of an analog photograph hanging in the middle.]

For Mejorado, 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. As she refuses to narrativize these images for her viewers, I also feel compelled to resist attaching my own narrative to them. Rather than reveal details imparted to me during our studio visit, I want to talk about what Mejorado is doing with her photographic practice through her intentional engagement with the archive as a kind of touchstone. The making of meaning is always a collaboration between artist and viewer, and what you see in these specific mirrors is dependent on your own relationship to images and archives. These images are photography at its best: they feature a combination of specificity and openness that is difficult to capture in a single image, but Mejorado gives us a whole series of these self-contained systems. 

Dillon Chapman is a Southern California-based artist who works in filmmaking and writing.

[Image descriptions by Dillon Chapman.]