On Wednesday, the day I don’t have to go to campus, J and I went to check out some West Town galleries for the first time. We went to see a cluster at 1709 W. Chicago Ave, and another cluster down on 835 W. Washington. Document and Western Exhibitions were the highlights, for me. Given that we went in the middle of a weekday, I was not surprised to find ourselves the only visitors in most of the galleries. The attendants in the respective galleries usually said “thank you for coming in” as we walked out, but they said little else while we were in the space. These galleries resembled a grown up version of 319 N. 11th Street in Philadelphia, the scene of so many First Friday openings I’ve attended in the past. In my mind I could picture the cooler at the end of the crowded hallway, with PBRs or some equivalent can for $2.
All I know about Laura Letinsky is that she’s on the faculty in the Department of Visual Art at University of Chicago. Before seeing “To Want for Nothing” at Document, I had seen a couple of her photos depicting domestic still lives. Certain objects—a bowl of peaches, a cantaloupe on a cutting board, cups and plates—artificially composed into a tabletop landscape. Precariously balanced off the edge. The color palette of her painterly photographs (i.e. photographs look like they could be paintings) reminds me of the filters on VSCO, an app I use to edit photos on my phone. But much more refined and subtle. Very aesthetically pleasing in a minor key sort of way.
In To Want for Nothing, there are collage-like compositions of what look like magazine pages. Some recurring motifs: stylized and stylish women, fashion advertising, domestic interiors. The title makes me think of “Freedom from Want,” the Norman Rockwell painting of the Thanksgiving scene. Without knowing if that is intentional, I think Letinsky’s juxtaposition of elements of women’s fashion, attractive domestic objects, and the pervasive glossy aura of magazine advertising is decidedly less earnest in spirit than that the painting. The expensive shoes, the nice clothing, the magazine aesthetic all suggest a concern with appearances, all points to a state of want rather than a lack thereof.
Perhaps it would diminish a bit of the magic created by these compositions, but I find myself wondering how Letinsky made them. Did she combine analog and digital processes? Did she tear and cut any images by hand to decide what to collage? Certainly there was a digital process of amalgamating the elements. Looking at the one picture I include (#25), the spilled milk appears to exist in a separate dimension from the two-dimensional page scraps. In the final product, an archival pigment print that is entirely flat, I think about the process of converting between three and two dimensions: taking a photograph of something in real life, then tearing that up and collaging it a certain way, then taking a photograph of the collage (complete with shadows behind the paper, showing their presence as physical objects), then modifying it digitally…
