Perimeter Editions x Izabela Pluta | Melbourne Book Talk
As a (long-awaited) celebration of Izabela Pluta latest book Lumina: The Photic Atlas (Perimeter Editions 108), we are delighted to present a Melbourne / Naarm book talk in store at Perimeter HQ (734 High Street, Thornbury). Taking place from 4pm–6pm, Saturday February 21, the event will comprise a conversation between artist Izabela Pluta and Melissa Keys, co-editor of the book and curator of the accompanying exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, as well as CCP Director Daniel Boetker-Smith.
A casual celebration with refreshments and a signing by the artist will follow the discussion – all are welcome!
EVENT DETAILS
Perimeter Books
734 High Street
Thornbury VIC 3071
Saturday February 21, 4pm–6pm
This is a free event, with no reservations required.
Please note that while children are welcome in the space, we are unfortunately unable to offer a 'kid-friendly' zone where kids can entertain themselves, and we require close supervision by parents or guardians while in the store.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The work of Izabela Pluta may enlist the optical, chemical, and technical processes of the camera and darkroom as its central pillar, but to describe her practice in terms of photography would seem insufficient. Over a career stretching the best part of two decades, the Polish-born Australian-based artist has forged a rigorous body of work that critically excavates the underpinnings of the photographic process, its modes of presentation, its fallibilities, and its broader implications. Her work is expressly photographic, but its bearings stretch far beyond the lens.
Lumina: The Photic Atlas – Pluta’s third book for Perimeter Editions – works to map and expand upon the artist’s site-responsive project, Lumina, at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, which explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time, memory, notions of impermanence, and questions of place. Made over the course of a year, and aligned with each change of season, Pluta worked in situ with curator Melissa Keys at Heide Modern, exposing lengths of silver gelatin photographic paper to the changing natural light. Laid out across the terrazzo floor, the artist used the modernist building as a type of camera and an unwitting collaborator, registering subtle shifts of shadows and streams of light as they passed through the glass walls and windows. Other similarly unconventional approaches to recording and spatial intervention unfold throughout the former home, engaging the senses and drawing our eye to things often unseen. Extending from the exhibition, the book takes on the role of a compendium or workbook, gathering the peripheral and actual processes of the project. In this way, it functions both as a continuation of the exhibition and a critical ledger of its conditions of possibility.
Featuring essays by Melissa Keys and Witold Kanicki, alongside creative texts by critical art and poetry collective Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange), the book also features photographs and video stills depicting Pluta’s childhood home in Warsaw, Poland, the interior of which was gutted and stripped back by its current owner, with tree stumps marking the places where conifer trees once flourished in the yard. These images forensically map out this personally significant place that still holds the patina of her family’s presence. In direct contrast to the fixity associated with the photographic image as a record of a moment in time, Pluta’s fieldwork methodology reveals a dynamic sense of continuous unfolding and entropy, articulating a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world.