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Exhibition Spotlight—Willa Nasatir

February 21, 2017

Installation view of Willa Nasatir. Photograph by Tom Loonan.

Each of Willa Nasatir’s evocative photographs begins as an assemblage of objects both common and unusual in the artist’s Brooklyn studio (you can just glimpse a window of that space in the background of Red Room). In the space between her constructions and camera she then props mirrors, bends Mylar, and deploys scrims of extruded Plexiglas and other intermediaries in order to complicate or obfuscate the camera’s address of these tabletop dioramas.

Installation view of Willa Nasatir
Installation view of Willa Nasatir. Photograph by Tom Loonan.

Although Nasatir’s images are abstractions, none are abstract. Each is sourced from a memory or a narrative, whether something the artist experienced or a powerful scene in an artwork or a film. However, they do not tell stories. Rather, her cobbling and filtering is a sleight of hand that unmoors her subjects from their origins. The resulting photographs call on us to create our own story lines.