Willa Nasatir

September 15 – October 26, 2024

Sea View is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York based artist Willa Nasatir (b. 1990, Los Angeles). Using analog processes that fragment and merge disparate images, Nasatir’s works unfold as semi-abstract portraiture of multidimensional, ever-expanding worlds.

In her photographic work, Nasatir creates compositions using makeshift sculptures that are further manipulated with mirrored glass, reflected light, and screens, all without digital editing tools. Similarly, her paintings dissolve a singular focal point by superimposing semi-transparent and porous subjects, including a champagne flute, lit match, swimming pool ladder and fruit. The resulting perspectives help to unmask and camouflage one another synchronously, arriving at a harmony that might dislocate one’s desire for linear sense-making. Held within translucent layers of acrylic paint, urethane, and gouache, visual hierarchies of gender, body, and capital are inexorably yoked. “There is a lot of fear in the world around the concept of changing form– making art in this way is my way of engaging with that,” says Nasatir.

In Can, 2024, a crushed can evolves into two figures interlocked in a kiss. Nasatir cites influences such as Man Ray and Alvin Baltrop, artists who push beyond the boundaries of a still image by teasing out what is visible and coded, intimate and staged. Nasatir’s chameleonic forms and gestures also conjure the works of Italian Futurists like Benedetta Capa Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, where time and movement are rendered prismatically. Nasatir considers spaces where the everyday, miraculous, violent, and beautiful occur simultaneously.