Willa Nasatir
Nasatir’s practice investigates varied approaches to imaging. In both her paintings and photographs the artist transforms everyday objects to the point of the surreal, collecting and accumulating her subjects before distorting and abstracting their forms through various analog, drawing, and painting processes. Her work dislodges bodies and objects from ingrained associations and preexisting meaning, allowing them to merge into hybrid forms with porous edges.
Fragmented compositions suggest both psychoanalytic and psychedelic perspectives, engaging Nasatir’s own subconscious associations. Through abstracted form, she plays with dualities of meaning and proposes an unraveling of perceived boundaries as they relate to gender and power.
Informed by her background in photography, Nasatir creates paintings that intentionally evoke the translucency and flatness of photographic images. In the exhibition, embedded visual keys connect the paintings and photographs, further collapsing the relationship between mediums in Nasatir’s practice. Her work exists within a continuum, each one woven in and out of itself in perpetual circulation.
Willa Nasatir (b. 1990, Los Angeles, California) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2012. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Gaylord Apartments, Los Angeles; Chapter NY, New York; and the White Room at White Columns, New York. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; the New Museum, New York; Hester, New York; David Zwirner, New York; Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles; Company Gallery, New York; and Drei, Cologne, among others.