Laura Letinsky at moniquemeloche

Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 259 : Feb 11–17, 2010 

The title of Laura Letinsky’s series “The Dog and the Wolf” evokes the space between civilization and the natural world. Like her four photographs, the phrase suggests that space is narrower than we want to admit.

The Canadian-born artist, who’s taught at the University of Chicago since 1994, frequently photographs the remnants of everyday human consumption. In this series, she does so from odd perspectives and in the dying light of twilight, which falls across wrinkled tablecloths, scattered crumbs and bits of dried flowers. Her subjects reference the 17th-century Dutch tradition of vanitas: still-life paintings in which half-peeled lemons, seafood, rotten fruit and dead game symbolize the transient and bitter nature of earthly life.

In her technically compelling resurrections of the genre, Letinsky creates incongruous layers of organic and processed materials. In Untitled 24 (pictured), a half-eaten candy cane and a limp dead pigeon are lined up together along the edge of the table. An unwrapped Dum Dum lollipop hovers just above the bottom edge of Untitled 19—across from a pile of empty oysters and lemon peels. The strangeness of such juxtapositions isn’t the artist’s focus, however; rather, it’s the way twilight makes them appear.

Despite the gentle lighting Letinsky conjures for her photographs, the trash and crumbs strewn haphazardly across the tables, and the stains left by a vase of dead flowers, come off as the leftovers of an unnerving feast. The dead birds and eviscerated bunnies in these images remind us of the unwelcome gifts pets sometimes bring—eerie reminders of how close they are to their wild cousins.

- CW