Arts Territory Exchange participant Georgina Reskala lives in Santa Monica California. Her practice consists of photography using large format and pinhole cameras, She also works with found images and family photographs.Using long exposures, Reskala takes the ocean and Santa Monica beach in particular, as her subject, she prints (on archival paper or linen) and re-shoots the images many times over.
Untitled -Pinhole Camera photograph of the Ocean, Santa Monica. Georgina Reskala
She is interested in creating a process of constant translation echoed by her bilingual Mexican/American heritage and her frequent movement between the languages of Spanish and English. Learning to live in a state of translation is a motif which heavily informs the work and the sea is symbolic of this process for Reskala, she says ‘The ocean is an endless palimpsest and a daily reminder of my life in another country…I make a conscious effort to make images of the ocean in Spanish and translate them into English. Edit, translate again and go back and forth’.
Untitled - Pinhole Camera photograph of the Ocean, Santa Monica. Georgina Reskala
Reskala admits to being obsessed by repetitive processes - something she sees as akin to swapping between languages, looking for the point at which understanding or recognition begins to dissolve, becoming, in her words ‘like a story written from left to right and read from top to bottom’.