Eyebat, The Cutting Floor gathers 12 silver gelatin prints that incorporate photograms, light drawing, contact printing, enlarged “digital negatives” and hand-colouring techniques with oil pigments. Natasha Katedralis uses photographic tools, as one move in a sequence of gestures, to emphasize, dramatize and recompose the visual into a space of abstraction, flattening and association. These photo-come-collage-come-drawings push the illusory qualities of the photographic medium into a play of highly constructed and graphic surfaces.
Having recently learned photo-developing techniques under mentorship of artist and darkroom technician Felix Rapp, the prints exist as an experimental extension of the artist’s engagement with photography and images. Using the analogue process, Katedralis combines digital photography with the physical ephemera that constellate her wider practice such as drawings, collage materials and collected items of significance. Fragments of computer desktop images, torn out magazine pages, ink drawings, family heirlooms and renderings of the artist’s house keys, indiscriminately converge in the material space of light-sensitive paper and the liquid chemicals that develop them.
