Artist: Laura Letinsky

Paul recommended I look into this artist in a meeting we had in September. When I first looked at her still life photos, I thought they were not really related to the work I'm making. After reading about them I found that her concepts are very much related to mine, but in more of an indirect way. She is commenting on people without photographing people, which is something I like to do. Here still lifes show something missing, time has passed, people have come and gone, maybe a longing for something more. These ideas relate to things I'm trying to explore. Visually her minimal style is appealing to me as well.

Bio:
Laura Letinsky is an Associate Professor in the Committee on the Visual Arts. Originally from Canada, she moved to the United States to attend the Yale University School of Art from where she recieved her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1991. She previously taught at Bennington College, The University of Houston, and the Yale Norfolk Summer Program. "Venus Inferred," a series of large color photographs of couples has been shown in solo exhibitions including: the Guy McIntyre Gallery, NY; Presentation House, Vancouver; Lawndale Arts Center, Houston, TX; pArts Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; and Optica Gallery, Montreal, QUE. A monograph of these photographs with an essay by Lauren Berlant (Professor of English, U of C) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2000. Selected group exhibitions include: Domesticated, Worcester Art Museum. MA; Verisimilitudes and the Utility of Doubt, White Columns Gallery, New York, NY; The Body Photographic, New Orleans, LO, and; The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC. The work has been published in White Columns Gallery 1995, Mirror Paradox, and Critical Inquiry. Collections include the San Francisco MOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. She has begun a new series of photographs, still-lifes that explore the formal relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance. In winter 2002, she had a solo exhibition of "Morning and Melancholia" at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York. (from http://cms.uchicago.edu/faculty/letinsky.html)

Quotes:

"I think I was really afraid to look at myself. I had some resistance toward autobiography--I thought if I just photographed what I knew, then nobody else would be able to identify with it. But I also felt like I needed to try to figure out what I really cared about, and I guess part of my art idea, or the way that I work, is about using that as motivation--because it's so hard to make artwork. It takes so much time, it costs so much money, and there's no guarantee that anyone's even going to like it. So you might as well do something you really care about, because I don't know what other reason there is to do it. Whenever I feel like I'm floundering, or I can't locate what I want to do, I always stop, look around, and think about what makes me feel something. For example, I collect things. I can't afford to get expensive things, but I would always go to thrift stores and buy things I thought were beautiful. I love objects, so I began to photograph that subject, and the still-life work coalesced from there."
- from interview

"One thing I've noticed throughout all of your work, beginning with Venus Inferred, is this idea of distance. I'm never in someone's space; there's always a gap between me, as viewer, and the subject. With your newer photographs, you're showing me things that have been left behind, but I can never get so close that they become disgusting, which allows me to view the work more poetically, as opposed to interpreting it in a way that brings up a discourse about the grotesque or the body. The objects are always beyond my reach; there's a chasm I cannot bridge. It seems to be about that yearning or melancholy you were talking about earlier. Not only are the objects left behind, but we've lost our connection to them. 

When I first started doing the still life work in 2001, I was thinking a lot about point of view, and shifting from that earlier stance as a third-person, objective observer watching a couple, to a kind of play that involved a first-person point of view, as if I were watching myself take the photograph. I began to imagine the viewer as being a person in those stories or in those pictures, looking at the stuff in front of them. Then, in 2002, I started thinking about being a kid, and things being just out of reach--the sweet things, the things that are desirable yet also bad for you. I wanted that push-pull: the wanting but not being able to have, the having but not being able to want. "
- from interview

gallery

interview

website