Shadowing

Shadowing (2023) critiques the aesthetic sensibilities of found images lifted from genre-specific Reader’s Digest publications, notably Scenic Wonders of the World (1981). Based on a number of collages that saw the artist’s prized copy of the book effectively shredded, these large-scale photographic works disrupt the pictorial qualities of their source material, making them difficult to locate, read or otherwise interpret. The volumes from which Pluta selected her imagery reflect an optimistic, late-capitalist, Western point-of-view. They are indicative of a desire to make the world visually comprehensible as an adjunct to travel while also remaining in awe of nature’s incomprehensible beauty. Their emergence in the 1970s can be attributed to a growing market of middle-class readers with the means and desire to travel internationally, as well as technological advances in photography, printing, publishing and distribution. The compilation of images into ‘coffee table books’ like these was an attempt to evoke the unique qualities of a number of locations. The irony, however, is that such a collation does the exact opposite, flattening difference and instead presenting a visual parade of postcard views, devoid of any context. 

In Pluta’s collages, pages have been sliced and spliced into fragments where air, land and water converge. Violently abstracted, they disorientate and dislocate the geographies from which they are drawn. The straight and curved lines that define the collages are based on templates derived from technical drawing books for engineering students. Parts of each collage have a three-dimensional quality, as sections of cut paper curl away from the support to reveal shadowing beneath. 

extract from catalogue essay by Angela Connor: Izabela Pluta’s Shadowing Matrix (2024) is composed from a copy of the Reader’s Digest Scenic Wonders of the World (1981). Pre-internet, this coffee-table publication was intended to inform and inspire audiences with its illustrative pages on nature and the environment. For Pluta, the choice of utilising this particular Reader’s Digest was carefully considered. She observes that it ‘reflects an optimistic, late capitalist, Western perspective… indicative of a desire to make the world visually comprehensive as an adjunct to travel while also remaining in awe of nature’s incomprehensive beauty’.[1] The irony, she says, is that their collation does the exact opposite and her method aims to undermine these aesthetic sensibilities through layers upon layers of mechanical reproduction that destroy the book through their making.[2] 

Pluta’s work contains few of the indexical qualities that photography is widely known for. Her works are often abstracted with the intention of disrupting the pictorial source of the original material. Her methods for Shadowing Matrix include using a scalpel to repeatedly cut ‘windows’ into pages to reveal the pages underneath. She transforms what were once considered objects of desire into geometric shapes and lines, which are then placed on top and alongside photographic fragments.

‘The straight and curved lines that create the logic of the lines are based on templates derived from technical drawing books for engineering students. These schematics are a kind of geometry that is used to draw (communicate) three-dimensional space in two-dimensional form’.[3] From here, Pluta would ‘use these drawings of the shapes and transfer them onto the photographs in the book using a pencil on carbon paper, thereby leaving a visible trace of a line of the carbon in some parts, in other parts the blade would cut them away’.[4]

The scale of the works is also important here. The photographic grain of the images intensifies as the images are blown up to human scale. This amplification of the grain marks a particular time in photography – off-set printing and publishing – now superseded by digital technologies. The colour palette of the period is also capitalised on through subdued colours of teals and blues, a prominent palette in the 1980s that evoked an ever-ready optimism in opposition to the earthy colours of the 1970s.

[1-4] Izabela Pluta, email correspondence. 28 February and 5 May 2024