Julie Rafalski’s work examines modern era’s utopias and their representation. She seeks to foreground the seemingly apparent but not always visible. By creating new contexts of meaning the constructed nature of these images is revealed.

Her approach concentrates on the fragmentary, the marginal and the obsolete. Rafalski often reuses printed ephemera and images originally created to document modernist projects. She sources her images from books and encyclopaedias, which often show signs of wear, highlighting the fact that these printed pages have been handled by many others and have a history of their own. In Rip, a torn cover of a book about modern architecture was photographed and printed using the cyanotype printing process. This process was used in the Victorian era for printing images in books and was also used in making blueprints. This process antedates the depicted Alvorada Palace, designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1958. The “Palace of the Dawn” was so named as it was intended to herald the dawning of a new era in Brazil. The cyanotype technique as well as the tears in the cover seemingly place the image of the palace in an earlier age, in stark contrast to the image of the future that the palace was intended to convey.

The images Rafalski uses are often iconic images of modernist architecture or art. She subverts these images by re-framing them and drawing attention to more marginal details that point to other, not always visible elements. In People in the Encyclopaedia of Modern Architecture, images from a 1963 edition of this volume were cropped and enlarged to highlight the figures merely intended for scale. The architecture in these re-framed images becomes a backdrop for the figures who have now been placed centrally. These silkscreen prints explore the relationship between a human scale and a grand architectural vision.