Jessica Labatt recently won a solo show on the esteemed Humble Arts website. She's a Chicago based photographer who "engages photography’s potential as the link between physical and immaterial worlds." The work has a painterly approach and reminds me both of John Baldassari and Sarah Sze. I particularly enjoy the "actionable objects" in the work, the way the inanimate artifacts come to life in a world of their own.
From her Statement:
My photographs are formalist explorations of everyday objects and materials that engage the subjectivity and experiential qualities of matter. Juxtapositions of content, form, and color imbue dynamism into the still life tradition in their ability to place a still object into a state of becoming. In this state of action, the images have an autopoietic, or self-generating visual rhythm established within the composition’s architecture. Perspectival manipulations created with the large format camera shift and tilt the picture plane, creating a confusing sense of depth and scale. These images play with the illusionistic tendencies of photography and its potential to simultaneously reveal truths and spin falsehoods...These mind- bending forms result in pleasurable questioning that provokes an active looking.
