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Event: Artist Talk Voices: Jessica Labatte

50% Chance of Survival, 2019, archival pigment print, 20 x 16", courtesy the artist and Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

Date

October 13, 2020

Time

6:00–7:30 pm

Location

Virtual via Zoom

ABOUT THE EVENT

Almanac for Shade Gardeners

Date: Tuesday, October 13
Time: 6pm
Location: Virtual via Zoom

In Almanac for Shade Gardeners, Jessica Labatte will share photographs that champion beauty in every day through floral still lifes and colorful photographic abstractions.  Her pictures mark impermanence in the everyday domestic space of her home and garden, incorporating indexes of nurturing and the clutter of objects and materials that accompany parenthood and artistic practice within domestic spaces. Beginning with the documentation of every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season, Labatte has continued to make photographs over the course of three midwestern summers charting the cyclical and linear times of care-taking for both gardens and children.

Jessica Labatte creates constructed photographic images that explore the materiality of photography through light, color, illusion, and paradoxes inherent in photographic representation. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Northern Illinois University. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums including the Aperture Foundation, NYC, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, Hyde Park, IL; Higher Pictures, NYC, NY; and Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL. She was artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, NY;  Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, Saugatuck, MI; and Latitude, Chicago, IL. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum.com, and Chicago Magazine. Her work is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

Follow Jessica on Instagram.