Throughout her series iphone zooms, Victoria Pidust (b. Nikopol, Ukraine) finds beauty amidst banality through a close and playful gaze that filters familiar scenes into curious abstractions. The series began in 2017, shot on the artist’s iPhone 4S, capturing everyday happenings on that ubiquitous pocket-sized rectangle of glowing liquid crystal and lithium. This subset of the series, ssl1-5, features the ethereal wash of sunsets over Leon. Elsewhere in Pidust’s iphone zooms, everything from egg cartons to glinting metal car parts are rendered strange and sculptural by the artist’s canny eye. Touching all kinds of subject matter, the series abides the same repeated constraints: everything is shot on an iPhone, framed in-camera with the gesture of a zoom. Scenes from daily life are made strange through close-up cropping, occasionally intermingled with artefacts and ghosts conjured from digital noise. As degraded resolution presses at the margins of intelligibility, Pidust’s subjects melt into abstractions as painterly as they are photographic. Through these careful acts of defamiliarization, Pidust turns poor images—the opposite of the speed, frictionlessness, and high resolution so fetishized in our digital present—into a kind of sublime. 

Text by Adina Glickstein