Reconfigured/Rediscovered / PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography

installation view, left to right: Izabela Pluta, Iterative composition 1979 (pages 17-18 Australia) 2020; Blue spectrum and descent (12, V3) 2020; Spatial Misalignments 2018. Photo: Christian Capurro @townhallgallery

Reconfigured/Rediscovered
Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne
Presented as part of PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography.

Pluta’s 2018 work, Spatial Misalignments, evolved from conceptually and physically engaging with a type of book: by pulling it apart and employing a process to make photographs which is born out of the absence and presence of light and its reaction to the material surface of the object. This fuses together two maps that are originally printed on both sides of the page while light passes through the paper. Originally exhibited at Artspace Ideas Platform, Sydney (2018), the work was then published by Perimeter Editions, forming the artist’s debut artist book, Figures of slippage and oscillation, after winning the Perimeter Small Book Prize in 2019.  

The project explores the assumptions around how place is depicted and perceived. The 60 paper negatives 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made by employing a camera-less process of contact printing full-page relief maps from three different editions of an out-of-date atlas.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.

The presentation of this work is accompanied by two, more recent works that both situate and expand Pluta’s experimentation with these photographic processes and their inherent philosophies.

installation view, Izabela Pluta, Spatial Misalignments 2018. Photo: Christian Capurro @townhallgallery