The Muse – Laura Letinsky

Neither Natural nor Necessary by Laura Letinsky

I use photography in its capacity, and limitations to see with all its connotations of Perception, desire, and knowledge.  From the initial exhilaration about getting to stare, I realized this tool’s powerful implications.  Fundamental to my understanding of the medium is not only what is shown, but how; that is, photography as ideological apparatus.  To engage in its late-capitalist frenzied circuitry of production and consumption is, for me, to enter into a reconfiguration of this system, to call into question not only what and how we see, but also of what seeing enacts.

My photographs are developed from a long-standing engagement with pictorial traditions informed by painting’s lineage and the omniprescence of photographic media. My Ill Form & Void Full series invokes objects and spaces linked to our private lives so as to examine the tensions and confluence of want and need. While my earlier photographs used an actual tabletop as their point of origin, I now build reference to the home from existing images including Martha Stewart magazines, my old work, art magazines, and objects. This mash-up of high to low, domesticity to the social, personal to social, is, as photographed, rendered as… photograph. That is, as image and material. Experience, mediated, is configured as question rather than as want.

The revelation that photography portends is inevitably both a product and construct of what we already know. We use it to convey our most intimate feelings and ideas but by what means does private experience come to be defined and described in an era of YouTube, Facebook and reality TV? Its liminality is both fascinating and confounding. For me, drawing from the infinite stream of images better actualizes our ideas about what and how we perceive with perception itself predicated upon what has come before. In my work I aim to entice, frustrate, and provoke my viewer’s sense of space and place so as to call into question our sensory, and other, understandings.

With thanks to University of Chicago.

Previews: Thursday, March 12, 7pm – 9.30pm
Until Thursday, March 26

46 Dr. V. B. Gandhi Marg, Rhythm House Lane, Kala Ghoda, Fort

www.focusfestivalmumbai.com // info@focusfestivalmumbai.com
Open daily, 10am – 7pm (later during special events)
Directions: Opposite the synagogue, near Rhythm House