Digitised. — Memories change slightly every time you remember them because your brain forgets details and then fills them in with approximations
this is a similar concept to what AI does when enhancing image resolution or removing distractions in images. It doesn’t know the exact details or pixels in an image, but uses pattern recognition and approximations to reconstruct lost details.
Both look similar to what was really there but aren’t exactly real.
How would you know the spiral wasn’t really there ?
and yet it was really there, an object I touched and placed on the image. what does reality mean to you?
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#analogue #analoguephotography #filmphotography #darkroomexperiments #darkroomprint #filmphotography #photographer #filmphotographer #35mm #film #filmphoto
Come to our graduate exhibition!
The Muse, TAFE Ultimo
30th May - 5th June (Closed Sunday)
Where Memory Insists by Chali Mendoza is a series of photographs that uses contrast (between digital/analogue, colour/B&W) to separate an experience from the memory of it, and to question what holds open the space between. The photo series builds colourful, lively scenes and then uses experimental darkroom techniques to create a black and white ‘memory’ version of the moment. Incorporating only the empty environment and a central object from the colour scenes, the foggy monochrome images suggest that material things and physical places are the lasting witnesses of meaning; the inanimate vessels that often carry memory further than our own minds do.
Those exhibiting:
@fiona.mcclintock.photography@liamwills.pdf@jordynh_photography@carissa_photography07@khang_photography12@crystalbuckinghamphoto
Thanks so much to everyone who helped me complete this project, appreciate you and hope you come by and check out the final result of all our efforts <3
@lulu.barkell@maya.gdd@tulsiiprasad@miette.spiess@kei__gar@jasonrudd_@zaradrinkwater@castellbehindthesscene@thesodafactory@poppy_fava@mercedesdunn_xx_
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#photographer #exhibition #artist #multimedium #sydney
Replacing AI with both hands 🫶
Printed a portrait of my great grandma and then solarized it
these were colour negatives (I struggled to find any b&w film in Bogotá) so the contrast isn’t that great but i still like how it turned out
#photographer #darkroomprint #artist #darkroom #sydney
What if home is just a hand feeling the houses,
the streets, the walls of your city?
What are you meant to do with your hands
if the buildings become just bricks
and the home becomes just a memory?
Real places
Real rubble
What if it was your city that was destroyed
What if it was your city
What if it was you?
Stay present, stay open to the world, keep paying attention
Even if it’s hard
Even if it feels hopeless.
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Images are darkroom silver halide prints / photograms - solarised and fogged
Negatives from chinatown Sydney - 2022
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#freepalesti̇ne #freesudan #photography #darkroom #sydney
The way that memories go as time passes
like water, like chemicals
burning a little as they dissolve.
#darkroomprint #analoguephoto #35mmfilm #photographer #sydney
Some film scans from Colombia :)
In colour and before darkroom experimentation (only landscapes)
Places I belong to
Bogotá, the mountains, the markets
The houses of my grandmas and grandpa,
my uncles and aunts, my cousins,
my great grandmother
My family’s farm near gachancipá,
and the apartment in a town called Girardot
The bookstore in Usaquén that hosts poetry workshops
Places I wish I could just pop by and stay a while
Places I love, that hold love for me
Grateful to have the privilege of living in Australia
What a beautiful country we have.
What beautiful countries we leave, too
I have my homes in my heart 🇨🇴
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#filmphotography #bogota #multicultural #diaspora #sydney
Staying with the Trouble Artist Feature : Oddity (Chali Mendoza Mendez)
This work will be featured at Rofe Street Gallery, on the 20th February, from 6-9PM
Inherited Negatives, 2025, Six 5x7” Prints on a light box
Oddity is a multidisciplinary, Australian Colombian artist who uses attention as a method of sitting inside the tension of contradiction. Through darkroom photography, poetry, and sculpture, Oddity interrogates the unresolvable nature of being, and focuses on capturing the states in between connection and remembering. Oddity centres embodiment, elevates objects, and alters images, shaping her perception of complexity while maintaining openness. Inherited Negatives is a series of experimental darkroom prints that merges personal negatives and family negatives to explore the diasporic difference between inherited and personal memory. Oddity, having been born in Colombia but raised in Australia, wrestles with cultural dislocation and familial distance. Through double exposure of Colombian and Australian negatives, Oddity merges timelines and places in the darkroom, experiencing closeness in image that cannot be carried out in bodies. Oddity also uses techniques such as solarisation and fogging to create dark, blurry, and uneven effects on the prints, emphasising the unresolved and patchy memory of a diasporic identity.
