Natalie Czech

Natalie Czech’s work makes concrete links between photography and poetry. In magazine articles, album covers, or product packaging she finds and reveals existing modernist poems by the likes of Robert Creeley, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Jack Kerouac; texts that often consist of repeated words or short phrases. Highlighting these by hand, the original material is then photographed and presented as flattened and framed pictures. This process conversely results in highly layered palimpsests: the imagery that appears in the archival material is put in dialogue with the poems that are revealed to have been nestling alongside them. Czech’s ongoing investigation into different registers of meaning invites the viewer to actively shift their focus between text and image, and between existing information and unexpected discoveries.