American artist Nina Katchadourian created more than 1,000 images and several video works using everyday materials found aboard aeroplanes during her 11-year Seat Assignment project, which ran from 2010 to 2021. Her project, Seat Assignment, began in 2010 and features improvised artworks made with items such as pretzels, paper towels, drinking straws and seat-belt buckles.
Katchadourian started the project during flight from New York to Atlanta. She used objects available around her seat to create different compositions, which she photographed with her iPhone. She continued making the photographs during subsequent flights until 2021. The collection has since been published as a book titled Seat Assignment by Primitive Books.
How Nina Katchadourian Started 'Seat Assignment'
Katchadourian began Seat Assignment in 2010 while travelling from New York to Atlanta. During the flight, she reflected on how frequent air travel was taking time away from her studio and artistic work. She decided to challenge herself to create something throughout the journey using whatever materials she could find inside the aircraft.
Her first experiments included arranging pretzels into different compositions, turning drinking straws into bridges over a miniature landscape and using the reflective metal buckle of a seat belt to produce a self-portrait. After completing the first set of photographs, she decided to continue the exercise on future flights.
Katchadourian established specific rules for the project. She would not bring materials specifically intended for making art on board, would only use objects found during the journey and would photograph her creations using an iPhone.
Everyday Objects in Her Photographs
Katchadourian used food, clothing and disposable aeroplane materials to create the photographs in Seat Assignment. Her works include Pretzel Landslide (2010), Sweater Gorilla (2011) and Evil Kitten (2013).
Other images show bread rolls, blueberries, strawberries, croissants and radishes arranged into faces and figures. She also used mint Life Savers to create a structure resembling Stonehenge.
During a flight from San Francisco to Auckland, New Zealand, she produced a series of self-portraits inspired by Flemish painting. She used toilet-seat covers and paper towels to create collars and headpieces, photographing herself inside the aircraft's lavatory. One of the photographs, Lavatory Self Portrait in the Flemish Style #14 (2011), is included in the Seat Assignment collection.
Her Other Art Projects
Katchadourian has also worked on several other projects involving photography, sculpture, books and found objects. Her ongoing project Sorted Books, which began in 1993, features collections of books arranged to form poems or literary fragments. She also started The Genealogy of the Supermarket in 2005, organising familiar characters from grocery packaging, including Betty Crocker, Orville Redenbacher and the Gerber Baby, into a family tree.
Another project, Mended Spiderwebs, involves repairing damaged spiderwebs using red thread. Her projects have explored different materials and artistic techniques, including photography, installation and performance.
'Seat Assignment' Published as a Book
Primitive Books has published Seat Assignment, a collection of hundreds of photographs Nina Katchadourian created between 2010 and 2021. The book features images from throughout the project, including her compositions using food, clothing and other materials found aboard aeroplanes. Among the photographs included are Giant Redwood (2012) and her Flemish-style lavatory self-portraits.
The artist's Seat Assignment project ran for 11 years before ending in 2021. Its publication brings together the photographs created during that period in a single collection.
