1905 Building

In her first solo museum exhibition, Willa Nasatir (American, born 1990) presents evocative new photographs that capture her 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 child’s chair, a rubber snake. In the space between her constructions and camera she then props mirrors, bends Mylar, and deploys scrims of extruded Plexiglas.

At times, Nasatir seems to use these layers and visual barriers to evoke the distance between the present day and the past. Each individual photograph is sourced from a memory or a narrative, whether something Nasatir 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, and the resulting photographs call on us to create our own storylines.