Laura Letinsky: I Did Not Remember I Had Forgotten

These lush color photographs are the latest images from her ongoing series Morning and Melancholia, featuring the artist’s new fascination with sweets within the still-life context. Drawing on the classical arrangements of Dutch-Flemish still-life paintings, her photographs explore the domestic objects that are touched, devoured, and discarded. “By photographing the remains of a meal,” Letinsky says, “I am exploring the formal relationships between ripeness and decay, delicacy and awkwardness, control and haphazardness, waste and plenitude, pleasure and sustenance.”

A graduate of the Yale University School of Art, Letinsky is currently Associate Professor of Art at the University of Chicago. Letinsky has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and her work is in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others. Her series Venus Inferred was published as a book by the University of Chicago Press in 2000, and her work was recently included in Blink: 100 Contemporary Photographers (Phaidon Press, London, 2002). Recent solo shows include Edwynn Houk, New York; Jane Jackson, Atlanta; Stephen Bulger, Toronto; and group shows at The Kinsey Institute and Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba. Letinsky will have a solo show at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in Spring 2004.