Laura Letinsky: Now Again
Essay by Karen Irvine. Laura Letinsky's photo series Hardly More Than Ever records, in the style of Flemish still-life painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the aftermath of human consumption, capturing sunny tables against white walls, crumbs, orange peels, melon rinds and candy wrappers. Like her forebears, Letinsky evidences human presence through its absence, suggests death through decay (in this case, of peonies and half-eaten toast) and tacks on a moral message about the obscenity of abundance, of having crumbs to leave. Also like her forebears, she contradicts those messages implicitly, or at the very least complicates them, by making art that feels very likely to last, to withstand the effects of time. Recent photographs of formal flower gardens and empty rooms on moving day, with a shelf, a shade or a surge suppressor left behind, explore similar issues. Letinsky, who teaches at the University of Chicago, studied photography at Yale and has been a Guggenheim fellow. Her work has appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York. |
