Willa Nasatir

Willa Nasatir’s photographic practice investigates the legacy and limits of photography through her unique, analogue manipulation of the medium. Working across saturated, chromogenic panels and spectral, silver gelatin prints, Nasatir masks and transforms everyday objects to the point of the surreal. Beginning with a sculptural tableau in the studio, these bricolage constructions feature cast-offs and found detritus that take on symbolic weight for Nasatir in their gradual accumulation and repetition, as characters or cues in a larger narrative construct. Once surfaced in her final photographs, these initial sculptural elements take on the air of illusion, often photographed and re-photographed to the point of fracture and obscurity. In her paintings, Nasatir exploits the material conditions of painting through processes of layering and erasure, distorting images that begin as recognizable into abstraction. Her paintings explore the dissociation between what is depicted and what is seen.