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About to Happen is an ongoing series of images captured with a Bolex Reflex 16mm film camera in Iceland, set as triptychs to reveal the passage of time. Méndez's interests in issues of perception expand into the perception of light by the apparatus and that of the film stock, and as co-authors they have agency in the making of the image. Through this mechanism ‘chance’ is introduced, resulting in radiant chroma floods intensified by the irregular flickering of the frames, set against a subject matter of a mundane nature—a grass field, a waterfall, a field of arctic cottongrass where sheep grace. The latter being the subject of About to Happen, Karahnjukar 001–003. In Dettifoss 001, Méndez captures an instant of Europe’s largest waterfall—500 cubic metres per second, and in Brekka 001, a moment of barley grass being forcefully blown by the wind at a farm in the south of Iceland.




Karahnjukar 001-003, 2006, Lightprint and plexyglass, 15 x 20 inches.
Stills from Never Happened Again, Karanjukar.





Brekka 001-003, 2006, Lightprint and plexyglass, 15 x 20 inches.
Stills from At Any Given Moment, Grass 1.





Dettifoss 001-003, 2006, Lightprint and plexyglass, 15 x 20 inches.
Stills from At Any Moment, Fall 1.






Exhibition History:

REUNION, at AndLab, Los Angeles, California. May 15 – June 18, 2016, curated by Sunook Park. (group)

Rebeca Méndez: About to Happen, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, October 15, 2009 – July 15, 2010, curated by Barbara Drucker. (solo)