Willa Nasatir

American, born 1990

Rat King Escape

© Willa Nasatir

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

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© Willa Nasatir

Image downloads are for educational use only. For all other purposes, please see our Obtaining and Using Images page.

Rat King Escape, 2017

Artwork Details

Materials

chromogenic color print on panel, tacks

Measurements

82 x 67 x 2 inches (208.28 x 170.18 x 5.08 cm)

Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Credit

Charles W. Goodyear and Mrs. Georgia M.G. Forman Funds, by exchange, 2017

Accession ID

P2017:3.2

Boy, Rat King Escape, and Red Room all capture Willa Nasatir’s unique approach to staging, photographing, and rephotographing elaborate sculptural landscapes of her own creation. To make these works, Nasatir first assembles objects both common and unusual: copper tubing, a pair of broken eyeglasses, a motorcycle helmet, a baseball cap, a child’s chair, a rubber snake. She then complicates the composition by propping mirrors, bending mylar, and deploying scrims of extruded Plexiglas in the space between her constructions and camera. Every resulting image, no matter how surreal, is grounded in the artist’s studio-based practice and the city of New York. In fact, the window that can be glimpsed in the background of these photographs is a reflection of one in the artist’s Brooklyn studio.

Each individual photograph is sourced from a memory or a narrative, whether something Nasatir experienced or a powerful scene encountered in another artist’s artwork or a film. However, her images do not tell set stories. Rather, the artist’s cobbling and filtering is a sleight of hand that unmoors her subjects from their origins. The resulting photographs call on us, as the photographs’ audience, to create our own storylines.

Other Works by This Artist