“I was talking with a friend the other day, and she said that being an artist is thinking, This is bad, this is very, very, very, very bad, but not derailing it,” says Willa Nasatir, laughing. “Like throwing a birthday party and wanting to cancel it at the last minute. But the thing about being 33 is having a better grasp of how to sit through that.”
The artist is in a serene mood when I meet her at Los Tacos near Tribeca Park, and says that she hasn’t been feeling the post-show depression that often hits two to three weeks after an opening. The show in question is her third solo exhibition at Chapter NY, the gallery that has represented the Los Angeles native since 2016.
The obligatory CV line about Nasatir tends to include the fact that she had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art five years out of Cooper Union, but what’s useful in approaching Nasatir’s compositions across photography and painting is the psychoanalytic dictum at the heart of her work: Everyone and everything that appears in our dreams is a part of ourselves.
Nasatir’s pictures break down and anatomize the solidity of objects by splitting them up into parts, giving form to how the body is marked by and yields to the multiplicities of desire, power, and pleasure.
As an observer-participant of the world she depicts, her process is arguably one of the subject reflecting on herself as an object, and the central theme of her work might be that of relationships—those that constellate the fractured facets within personality, sexuality, and friendship, dynamics that are never concretized but drift in an ever-shifting tide of ebbs and flows.
A couple days before our meeting, Nasatir had a dream that an Angelyne-like figure driving a hot pink Corvette backed into her car. The strongest emotional current in the dream was one of relief, she remembers, as she’d recently switched her car insurance from California to New York.
She pauses as she realizes she’s made a photograph of a brick smashing into a toy Corvette. It’s currently hanging in the Chapter NY show. Why did she make it? “I’m not sure,” she grins. “I guess to fulfill the dream I had a month and a half later.” She seems genuinely bewildered by this, but reasons, “I’m happy that my work still feels mysterious to me, that it doesn’t feel solved or like I’ve reached the edges, the contours of the thing.”
For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Oscar yi Hou.
