Bringing the distance near
TEAM Gallery, University of Wollongong
Izabela Pluta’s exhibition ‘Bringing the distance near’ explores the misalignment between spatial and temporal experiences and states of displacement and how this manifests in, and resonates through, themes of the ruin and concepts of place. The exhibition – which was the final presentation of the practical component that comprised her Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Wollongong - presents components of the projects developed during the practice-led research entitled: Taken on the same day as the other photo; Agency of Inanimate objects and Blue Distance.
Pluta’s photographic vocabulary operates across various material forms and images: realist photomurals, re-photographed photographs, photo-collages, artist’s books, found paraphernalia and discarded things from the natural world. For Pluta materiality is ‘an archive of relations and transformation’, that engages with the image and an ‘imagined place’.
Pluta uses the photograph as the form of an idea via an expanded photographic materiality. Her work aims to distill and interrogate the way that her ideas and images have become separated from their original context, as well as the process by which they are re-assembled. She uses the term ‘gleaning’ to describe her methodology as a kind of ‘poetic scavaging’ that resonates with the philosophical terrain of place, nostalgia and diaspora. Her works provide insight and draw on a range of pictorial, aesthetic, material and communicative devices out of broader fields of photography, the archive and practices of archaeology.
Pluta describes the significance of gleaning ‘as not only a methodology for the present moment in the context of global diasporas, but also as a way of introducing new possibilities for restructuring our understanding of spatial and temporal orientation, free of specific geographical and chronological positions in art, as well as the everyday’.
Andrew Frost has recently written on Pluta’s exhibition Blue distance (UTS, Sydney) in 2014 and described her photomural images and collages ‘that overlay geometry, history and art onto the world’ as being 'both within the image and outside it. The familiarity of these scenes and experiences seem poignantly recognisable – we could easily walk around and see these places and these things. But it is because of that documentary aesthetic that we also feel so estranged from these moments’. Pluta’s work reflects the complex relationship between ‘our desire for an exceptional moment and the quotidian experience - the exotic and a comforted return to normality’. Her work attempts to make sense of our place within the world, ‘yet when we see that process reflected back at us it seems incredibly strange.’
Pluta’s research explores how a work of art might adopt a certain range of artistic photographic strategies that describe and manifest what, in the present contemporary moment, it might mean to be from another place.