Laura Letinsky: What Matters
June 21 - September 11, 2011
Still life rose its gorgeous head in 17th century Dutch paintings of delectable rotting fruit; sumptuous arrangements of flowers; gleaming tipped glasses, and half-eaten meals. In 1997, Letinsky began to photograph still life tableaus she set up in her Chicago studio. Her minimal photographs, on the other hand, were of "paper plates, plastic cups, tin cans, and bottle tops disposed on white surfaces in white rooms. Instead of images of overabundance, she presents the more modest remains of a snack or a drink or a child's birthday party. But Ms. Letinsky's photographs are less concerned with the symbolic implications of leftovers than they are with the evocative power of light. The transformation of edges and surfaces of table, wall, and room into shifting zones of off-whites and warm to cool gray creates interiors that are at once understated and luminous," according to poet and leading critic Mark Strand.
Exhibition funded by:
This activity is made possible by a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, which receives funding from the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Programming is supported in part by a grant from the City of Grand Forks through the North Valley Arts Council.
Laura Letinsky
Untitled #49, From the Series Hardly More Than Ever, 2002
Type-C Print
