Willa Nasatir, Bus Depot, 2017

Willa Nasatir: All of my work has somewhat of a surreal element. I think the idea of bending reality within a photograph is something that I am always interested in. Less Surrealism as in an art movement, and more the difference between how something can appear figurative and abstract at once, and that there's a blurry line between what you can understand and define, and what you don't have language for.

I get a lot of joy out of making artwork. It's a way of processing the world to me that is funny and doesn't have a purpose, or an explicit purpose, and so you're allowed to have a sense of absurdism and feel like it’s okay to do something that isn't necessarily logical or effective.

Film noir, I like, because there's such an elevated sense of drama and these kind of filmic tropes of suspense or fear or something is "up," is always something that I like to see how you can convey within a still photograph, like what is it to just pose something and light it and to be able to convey that feeling?

Narrator: The works in this series are silver gelatin prints—a black-and-white chemical printing process largely associated with twentieth-century modernism.  

Willa Nasatir: I'm not super attached to the technique, although it's beautiful. I think it's helpful for me to be working simultaneously very large and very small, and with a super deep color palette and something is more restrained, it's like a balancing challenge.