Born in Canada in 1962, Laura Letinsky received her MFA from Yale University in 1991, and was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. Her recent series, Ill Form and Void Full, was presented as a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in Winter 2012, and part of a mid-career retrospective at the Denver Art Museum in 2013. Letinsky's work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Stuttgart Museum, Germany, among others. Letinsky's work has been the subject of five monographs: Venus Inferred (University of Chicago), Hardly More than Ever (Renaissance Society), Now, Again, (Galerie Kusseneers), After All (Damiani) and Ill Form and Void Full (Radius Press).
In her new series of still lifes, a genre that has occupied her for 15 years, Letinsky reflects on the temporality of the still life, the self-referentiality of the photographic medium, and the mutability of perception. By combining images from her own photographs and those culled from magazines, alongside actual objects, she dissolves the difference between what is real and what is mediated, and between what is flat and what is dimensional. In addition, by using white as a color, the edges of paper as lines, and shadows as planes, Letinsky upends the viewer's sense of space and perspective.
The arrangements in Ill Form & Void Full employ two-dimensional elements as sculptural objects, to dizzying effect. Collaged cutouts of food and tableware are pinned, taped or glued onto reproductions of table surfaces or white paper, all of which are placed on the studio wall and actual tabletops, creating a multiplicity of facades that collapse perspective and float in an indecipherable space of light and shadow.
The juxtaposition of three-dimensional objects alongside their reproductions conceptually defuses the temporal urgency associated with vanitas. The tension here is rather the play between real and illusory space, and the puzzling implication of dimensionality on a flattened picture plane. A similar tension is present in another current series of collage studies, Albeit, which mimic glossy magazine pages.
Rooted in the Dutch-Flemish vanitas tradition, Letinsky's arrangements address the notion of time and the relationship between ripeness and decay; however, they do so by questioning notions of photographic authenticity, and the medium's capacity to illustrate temporality vis-à-vis form, material, and narrative.
Letinsky's new work has deepened the artist's previous explorations into the still-life genre. Previously, works from The Dog and the Wolf and Fall utilized oblique lines of perspective and depth, juxtaposition of incongruent objects, and exquisitely controlled gradations of light as a backdrop to illuminate ideas surrounding food, desire, and death. In To Say It Isn't So, Letinsky conflated the timeless beauty of the classical still life with the chaotic banality of contemporary consumer culture. In her first series of still-life works, Hardly More Than Ever, Letinsky's interest was the way that the domestic space is constructed or made-up, creating photographic space to comment on the made-up-ness of "home".