ARTIST STATEMENT
There is a latent spark within analog processes that continually inspires me: the way light, touch, chemistry, and time can produce something unexpected. I embrace the imperfections and possibilities of analog photography, allowing the process itself to become part of the work. Working with traditional darkroom techniques—including wet collodion, expired Polaroid film, and, more recently, lumen prints—I explore identity, vulnerability, and transformation. Experimentation is as essential to my practice as the final image.
My work is an ongoing investigation into the body as vulnerable and ever-changing. My subjects range from figurative portraiture to abstractions created with saliva, hair, blood, bathwater, and breastmilk. Across these works, there remains a connection to the corporeal. Like the body itself, the images are subject to change; forms emerge, shift, and fade. Somewhere between beauty and decay, something is revealed—an ambiguous truth that asks more questions than it answers.
Galina Kurlat (b. 1981, Russia) is a photographic artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BFA in Media Arts from Pratt Institute. Kurlat’s practice explores the relationship between subject and photographic material, embracing the imperfections, unpredictability, and transformative possibilities of analog and alternative photographic processes. Her work moves between the recognizable and the ephemeral, allowing light, chemistry, touch, and time to become active collaborators in the making of the image. By embracing the change and chance inherent in photographic materials, Kurlat challenges photography’s traditional role as a representational medium.
Kurlat’s work has been exhibited internationally in the United States, South Korea, India, Scotland, and France. Recent exhibitions include: Science Girl Party, Candela Gallery, Richmond, VA Traces, Louisville, Kentucky; Vestige, Treat Gallery at VOLTA, NYC; Shadow Play, Peter Halpert Fine Art, NYC; Process, Studio Bizio, Edinburgh; Touch Me Touch You, Jinju International Photo Festival, South Korea; and Self-Processing—Instant Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans.
Her work has been published in Oxford American, Fraction Magazine, Houston Chronicle, Diffusion IX, and Fraction of a Second (Radius Books), among other publications and catalogs. Her work is held in private collections throughout the United States and abroad.
Kurlat is the co-founder of Main Street Projects, an artist-run organization in Houston that has presented the work of more than 150 local, national, and international artists. From 2005–2011, she also curated multimedia and site-specific exhibitions in alternative spaces throughout New York City.