Izabela Pluta, Image After Image #7, 2023. Unique C-type photograph, 150 x 100cm. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.

Image After Image, Izabela Pluta’s second solo exhibition with Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, is anchored by seven unique, large-scale photographs that share a singular source image: a film negative from Pluta’s personal archive. This image captures a sky view from an aeroplane window, that was taken by her father as her family emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1987.

In the darkroom, Pluta abstracts the source image beyond the point of legibility and into a series of striking blue and pink colour fields. She achieves this by manipulating the projection of light onto photographic paper with a range of experimental processes including a disassembled camera lens. Released from the precision of their manufactured casing, the unstable lens components cause the negative image to collapse and shift, slipping in and out of focus during and between each exposure.

Pluta both mythologises and disrupts this moment within her personal history, underscoring the fallible nature of photography while subtly proposing that memories may be as malleable as light. Complementing this suite of photographs is a set of Lumen prints – of the disassembled camera lens in question – whose ghostly contours of repeating circles fixed to the photographic paper by solar exposure form a kind of photogenic drawing; and a bronze sculpture of the artist’s hands that reveal a negative-space mould of the camera lens’s constituent parts.

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