EXHIBITION

Yours, More Pretty

Yancey Richardson, New York, New York, 09/04/2014 - 10/18/2014

ABOUT

Yancey Richardson is pleased to announce Yours, 
more pretty, an exhibition of new photographs by 
Laura Letinsky, presented in conjunction with the 
release of the artistʼs fourth monograph, Ill Form & 
Void Full (Radius Books). The exhibition includes the 
most recent works from Letinskyʼs on-going series, Ill 
Form & Void Full, which reflects on temporality and 
desire in the still-life genre, the self-referentiality of the 
photographic medium and the mutability of perception. 
Letinskyʼs compositions utilize fragments from her 
own photographs and those of other artists like
Richter or Matisse, as well as advertisements culled 
from magazines, dissolving the hierarchy between 
high and low imagery, and the notion of what is real 
and what is mediated. In addition, by using white as a 
color, the edges of paper as lines, and shadows as 
planes, Letinskyʼs compositions conflate flatness and 
dimensionality, upending the viewerʼs sense of space 
and perspective.
The arrangements in Yours, more pretty employ two-dimensional elements as sculptural 
objects, to dizzying effect. Collaged cutouts of food, feathers, tableware or abstracted swaths of 
color 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. As Letinsky describes, “Not 
only objects, but our relation to others, to our selves, is constantly shifting…I do strive to clear 
away all that is not necessary, to make the picture space a kind of precipice, anticipation always 
active.”
Rooted in the Dutch-Flemish vanitas tradition, Letinskyʼs 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 mediumʼs capacity to illustrate temporality vis-à-vis form, 
material, and narrative. As Letinsky states, “My photographs are very much about this medium, 
its self referentiality…I want an acute tension between what is in the picture – the image, what is 
name-able – and its status as an object.”

 

Image above: Untitled #40, from the series Ill Form & Void Full, 2013. Archival pigment print. 49.5 x 58.12 inches, edition of 9.

 

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