In the series Shadowing, Izabela Pluta critiques the aesthetic sensibilities of found images lifted from genre-specific Reader’s Digest publications, notably the 1980s ‘Scenic Wonders of the World’. The emergence of these publications can be attributed to a growing market of middle-class readers with the means and desire to travel internationally, as well as technological advances in photography, printing, publishing, and distribution. The compilation of images into coffee table books were an attempt to evoke the unique qualities of world locations. Ironically, such collations do the exact opposite, flattening difference and presenting a visual parade of postcard views, devoid of any context.

In Pluta’s collages, pages have been sliced and spliced into fragments where air, land and water converge. Violently abstracted, they disorientate and dislocate the geographies from which they are drawn. The collages have a three-dimensional quality, as sections of cut paper curl away from the support to reveal shadowing beneath.