Long-haul flights can seem like a singularly uncreative time for many people. Artist Nina Katchadourian discovered that an airplane’s lavatory provided the art materials necessary to make Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. It is part of her larger piece Seat Assignment, in which she improvises with a camera phone and materials on hand in flight to make photographs, video and sound works.
Seat Assignment is about “thinking on your feet…optimism about the artistic potential that lurks within the mundane…curiosity about the productive tension between freedom and constraint.”
Katchadourian describes the birth story of her project:
While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror using my cellphone. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture… I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs. I was wearing a thin black scarf that I sometimes hung up on the wall behind me to create the deep black ground that is typical of these portraits.
Nina Katchadourian
Here are some of the thematic categories that emerge on Seat Assignment:
High-Altitude Spirit Photography
Proposals for Public Sculpture
Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style
via Bored Panda
