IZABELA PLUTA
PLUTA_mirrors3.JPG

Habitat

Izabela Pluta’s work examines the various ways that place is manifested or experienced. She uses photographs to explore serendipitous encounters, the effects of time and how the photographic image operates as a vehicle for witnessing various states of ruin.

Many of Pluta’s photographs depict incomplete or redundant dwellings attempting to convey a disconnection between the places we inhabit and the spaces we experience. Her images investigate the idea that landscape only hints at an actual place while prompting a search or intrinsic desire for definitive marks of distinction or familiarity. What initially appears as a disused space, upon closer inspection reveals signs of its inhabitants.

Her work often adopts a technique of using white acrylic applied onto the surface of the photograph through a silk-screen process. The white paint conceals certain areas of the image, in this case the foliage. She does this to explore the shift in the reading of the original and the ways in which the work may allude to a slippage between two realities: of a present longing for a past.

The photo-silk screen offsets the image and its acrylic layer creating a fragmented reproduction that is misaligned. Consequently the photograph becomes even further removed from the moment of reality therefore suggesting a psychological disconnection from a place. The mirrored image incites the transformation of spatial relations within the diptych while conflating the pictorial components towards a fantastical and imaginary reality.

Pluta uses photographs to explore how an empty site may invoke a longing for a place: how sites of redundant urban landscape evoke an interstitial space; how images void of human presence become distant but at the same time are familiar and how images can provoke us to feel a longing for what is no longer there.

The OUT THERE Billboard Art Program is a Yarra Council initiative in partnership with 7-Eleven.

 Habitat

Centre for Contemporary Photography
City of Yarra Billboard
February 1 - September 30, 2014

Izabela Pluta’s work examines the various ways that place is manifested or experienced. She uses photographs to explore serendipitous encounters, the effects of time and how the photographic image operates as a vehicle for witnessing various states of ruin.

Many of Pluta’s photographs depict incomplete or redundant dwellings attempting to convey a disconnection between the places we inhabit and the spaces we experience. Her images investigate the idea that landscape only hints at an actual place while prompting a search or intrinsic desire for definitive marks of distinction or familiarity. What initially appears as a disused space, upon closer inspection reveals signs of its inhabitants.

Her work often adopts a technique of using white acrylic applied onto the surface of the photograph through a silk-screen process. The white paint conceals certain areas of the image, in this case the foliage. She does this to explore the shift in the reading of the original and the ways in which the work may allude to a slippage between two realities: of a present longing for a past.

The photo-silk screen offsets the image and its acrylic layer creating a fragmented reproduction that is misaligned. Consequently the photograph becomes even further removed from the moment of reality therefore suggesting a psychological disconnection from a place. The mirrored image incites the transformation of spatial relations within the diptych while conflating the pictorial components towards a fantastical and imaginary reality.

Pluta uses photographs to explore how an empty site may invoke a longing for a place: how sites of redundant urban landscape evoke an interstitial space; how images void of human presence become distant but at the same time are familiar and how images can provoke us to feel a longing for what is no longer there.

The OUT THERE Billboard Art Program is a Yarra Council initiative in partnership with 7-Eleven.