Jessica Labatte’s photographic work is an investigation in photographic illusion, while respecting the material processes of photography. Labatte’s two recent interrelated series of color photographs explore photographic notions of the visible and invisible, the present and withdrawn as they champion beauty in the everyday as a radical gesture in our contemporary moment.
Almanac for Shade Gardeners is a series of floral still lifes —small and medium sized prints installed in a salon-style fashion in the gallery alongside three monumentally scaled prints— that mark impermanence in the everyday domestic space of her home and garden as Labatte has photographed every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season. The pictures incorporate indexes of nurturing and the clutter of objects and materials that accompany parenthood and artistic practice within domestic spaces. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists, Labatte’s photographs look to depict new definitions of feminist art practice.
The second series of photographs capture the experience of being in the garden, as color and dappled light are constantly in flux. In seemingly abstract works, color, light, and shadow explore an imagined virtual space beyond traditional notions of photographic representation. Drawing inspiration from Hilma af Klint and early photographic abstractionists such as László Moholy-Nagy, her Shadow Plants photographs meditate on color, time, and sensation. To create these brightly colored images, Labatte uses film and a large format camera to capture multiple exposures of collaged color paper. Her process allows one image to fuse with another, obscuring and revealing forms, textures, and the fleeting effects of light and shadow, creating a metaphorically virtual space for the visible and invisible within society, photographic image making, and art.
Past bodies of work address and employ light and color as a model for space and time; the barely visible, such as dust particles; minerals as pigments; and digital or antique photographic processes. For her Spotting series each image starts as colorful, studio-constructed collage and is then transformed by her unwitting collaborators — her assistants; they removed dust from scanned negatives in Photoshop and Labatte chose to save the traces of their labors by making the erasure layer visible in the final image. On Artforum.com, Zachary Cahill discusses this series in depth, writing “In a blurring of authorship, Labatte creates these images with her assistants and includes their first names parenthetically in the individual photographs’ titles. Together, they composed pictures by an accretion of digital erasures, most notably in Spotting #11 (Elyse, Jessica), 2014. If the process sounds complicated to understand, that’s because it is, though the end results aren’t. The photographs are visually generous and are marked by blasts of color that register the living quality of time itself.”
Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Elmhurst Art Museum; Hyde Park Art Center; Higher Pictures, NYC; Golden Gallery, and Horton Gallery, NYC. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum.com, and Chicago Magazine. Labatte received an MFA and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in the Chicagoland area.