Terminal Piece

Dissemblancer is the latest series of photographs by Megan Plunkett, commissioned by the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok) in Vienna on occasion of the exhibition Terminal Piece, the first exhibition under new director Fatima Hellberg and chief curator Lukas Flygare.

The series originates from photographs taken in April and May 2020, shortly after Plunkett completed her training in forensic photography. The methodologies, techniques, and approaches to photography learned in her coursework – entirely different from those taught in her undergraduate and graduate photography education – would prove fundamental to Plunkett's practice in the years to follow.

In early 2020, Plunkett had moved temporarily to Portland, Oregon, to act as a caregiver for her mother, who was suffering from dementia. Some days, Plunkett would find small collections of objects around the house: bowls and ceramics filled with dice, glue, dirt, the garage door opener wrapped in paper, lightbulbs, and dirty golf balls, among other things. Plunkett's mother's arrangements, assemblages that could pass for sculptures, proved good practice subjects for Plunkett's forensic photography.

Six years later, in 2026, Plunkett returned to the images after her mother's passing. She spent months looking, editing, re-editing, printing, and re-printing the photographs, a tactile experiment to negotiate and push the years-old images of these assemblages and objects that no longer physically exist. At the time, maternal inheritance, in both abstract and concrete terms, was also on her mind; according to family legend, Plunkett is the sixth consecutive female only child in her maternal lineage. Her mother's sculptures, and by extension the 2020 images Plunkett captured, took on a new significance.

At some point in her analysis and re-analysis of the images, Plunkett flipped one upside-down, unlocking the photographs' potential energy. The bowls, no longer grounded, and suddenly exempt from the pull of gravity, float through the air like UFOs, holding the dice and door opener close through their own magnetism. Photographed front and back, from close and far, printed small and large, the bowls leave us grasping for clues to their origin or their destination, indeed dissemblancers: extraordinary mementos mori captured mid-rotation, traversing an ever-expanding black void.