Natalie Czech

A Window View by Robert Creeley (Skyline), 2021

Natalie Czech’s photographic series Window Views is influenced by the political and social experiences during the 2020 lockdown. The motifs are based on historic covers from the iconic magazine The New Yorker. The magazine, founded in 1925, is known for its cover illustrations, often showing interior scenes or window views. Czech’s diptych work A Window View by Robert Creeley (Skyline) is based on a cover illustration by Charles E. Martin that was published in 1962. Referencing the city’s varying standards of living, the cover shows the New York skyline as collaged from clippings of various real estate advertisements. Natalie Czech cut out some sections of the depicted advertisements, revealing the interior content of the magazine, then marked with crosses certain words to “spell out” a poem by Robert Creeley. As Czech has stated: “Original text, motif, and the found poem construct a dialogue that makes palpable all the sidelines between the said and the unsaid, the hidden and the visible, the political and the private.”