In Kristopher Biernat's experimental Polaroids, we see teardrop-shaped figurations branching into fractals and imprints that resemble a jumble of fingerprints. Our eyes can lose themselves in the patterns as if they were a landscape, a labyrinth. But suddenly the whole picture looks like a screaming face, brightly lit by something outside the picture. 

Biernat's abstract Polaroids are reminiscent of the work of experimental film artist Bill Morrison, who composes old partially dissolved nitrate films into new works. In Morrison's work, the inherent materiality of film comes to the fore. The otherwise transparent medium, celluloid, bursts into colour and abstract patterns as it weathers. In other words, in its own decomposition, new images emerge with a renewed aesthetic quality. In Morrison's films, the old, captured images- the film scenes- are glimpsed 'beneath' the new aesthetic of decay. It is as if the two image forms are fighting each other. Morrison's films are like preserved ruins where decay is frozen at its most beautiful stage, where the history of the building can still be seen but it has simultaneously acquired a new aesthetic relevance in its new abstract form. 

In Biernat's Polaroids, abstraction has taken over, and the many associations that arise from the images are harder to grasp. They slip away, like the eyes in the wooden ceiling. But the haptic experience remains. The eyes glide over the Polaroid, sending nerve signals to the fingers as if you were touching the structure of the image with your sight. 

The marvel of pareidolia is the possibility it holds to be able to waver back and forth between seen and unseen. Our vision can be adjusted to see only the tree but, if we want to, also see the face twisting towards us. 

Issue no. 12 of Plethora Magazine delves into hidden patterns behind all natural form in pursuit of the fractal codes that shape progressions of growth, transformation and dispersion in the vast splendor of organic structures. When tracing the archetypical outlines of these dynamic configurations, intricate formulars are revealed that allows profound insights to the blueprints of the seemingly chaotic fabric of life. Slowly a new order appears in the wild lines of turbulence, propagation and dispersion and clues emerge that we may later harness through a fragmented prism of logic and intuition of form.
The journey takes its course through an investigative tale of wondrous fractals, kaleidoscopic visions, the phenomenon of pareidolia, uncanny illusions of mind, the diffused consciousness of cephalopods and the impossibility of black swans.
In the wide dissection of natural form, Plethora Magazine #12 enters further into the spectrum of natural pigments to highlight the organic dye processes involved in many of the traditional, pioneering photographic techniques and print types such as calotypes, cyanotypes, ferrotypes, silver albumen types, anthotypes and more.

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