IZABELA PLUTA

Figures of slippage and oscillation

Izabela Pluta’s exhibition, Figures of slippage and oscillation, explores the assumptions around how place is depicted and perceived. The main component of her installation includes 60 paper negatives that have been made by employing a camera-less process of contact printing full-page relief maps from three different editions of an out-of-date atlas. What eventuates is a visual collapse of states, territories and geographical names that blurs the distinction between the land masses, their coordinates and the political entities that govern them. While conceptually anchored in Pluta’s experience as a Polish migrant to Australia, the artist’s process of dislocating the features of each map also proposes a critique of the procedures of colonialism, its related hegemonic discourses and the effects of globalisation.

Pluta’s working method explores how things come together and draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring materials that are both photographed and found. In this new work the process and structure of making photographs is born out of the absence and presence of light and its reaction to the material surface of the pages of a superseded map.

The accompanying component of this new work–and around which this project was conceived–is a piece of audio which charts places travelled. This monologue is played in random order, and describes a chronical of movement around the world in an account of recollection and memoir: of places called on, experienced and occasionally forgotten.

Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Sydney-based artist working with photography as a way of interpreting and re-conceptualising the function that images have in the present – how they might depict the world they operate within, not only in relation to the mobility of images, but in response to the movement of people and the experiences they embody. Her works examine the visual, material and conceptual nuances of expanded forms of photography to explore processual phenomena and our engagement with the uncertainty of the ecologies of relation and place.

Pluta has exhibited widely in Australia at Australian Centre for Photography, 55 Sydenham Rd, UTS Gallery and Galerie Pompom, Sydney; Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane; 24 HR Art, Darwin; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts; Canberra Contemporary Art Space; The Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery; and Westspace, Edmund Pearce Gallery, Linden Contemporary Arts Centre and Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, among many others. In 2012, she was commissioned to create Unset Typologies, a public artwork for the City of Melbourne. In 2017, Pluta was a finalist in the Bowness Photography Award at the Monash Gallery of Art, and in 2018 was shortlisted for the MAMA Foundation National Photographic Award. She is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney and is a lecturer at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney.

Figures of slippage and oscillation

Artspace, Sydney
29June - 15 July 2018

Izabela Pluta’s exhibition, Figures of slippage and oscillation, explores the assumptions around how place is depicted and perceived. The main component of her installation includes 60 paper negatives that have been made by employing a camera-less process of contact printing full-page relief maps from three different editions of an out-of-date atlas. What eventuates is a visual collapse of states, territories and geographical names that blurs the distinction between the land masses, their coordinates and the political entities that govern them. While conceptually anchored in Pluta’s experience as a Polish migrant to Australia, the artist’s process of dislocating the features of each map also proposes a critique of the procedures of colonialism, its related hegemonic discourses and the effects of globalisation.

Pluta’s working method explores how things come together and draws largely on finding, fragmenting, translating and reconfiguring materials that are both photographed and found. In this new work the process and structure of making photographs is born out of the absence and presence of light and its reaction to the material surface of the pages of a superseded map.

The accompanying component of this new work–and around which this project was conceived–is a piece of audio which charts places travelled. This monologue is played in random order, and describes a chronical of movement around the world in an account of recollection and memoir: of places called on, experienced and occasionally forgotten.

group exhibition ‘Reconfigured/Rediscovered’ . @townhallgallery @photofestivalau Izabela Pluta Iterative composition 1979 (pages 17-18 Australia) 2020 Pigment Print on Eco Solvent Cotton Rag Paper, mounted on dibond 124 x 200 cm Blue spectrum and descent 12 (Variation 4) 2020 Cyanotype 52 x 42 cm Photo: Christian Capurro

featured in the group exhibition Reconfigured/Rediscovered , Town Hall Gallery Melbourne as part of the Photo2021 International Festival of Photography
Photo: Christian Capurro
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