Artists: Laura Letinsky - John Paul Morabito

Yancey Richardson presents orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit, an exhibition of cotton and wool tapestries made by Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito.

Since 2013, Letinsky and Morabito have worked collaboratively, bringing photography and weaving into dialogue and exploring the cooperative possibilities between the two mediums. Central to their conception of this project was an understanding of the loom as a kind of precursor to the creative capacities eventually unleashed by the computer and the digital age more broadly.

In orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit, Letinsky continues her career-long investigation of photography’s relationship to temporality, specifically through the genre of still-life. While travelling across India in 2014, Letinsky made multiple trips to the Bangalore Flower market where she found streets transformed by remnants from the early morning market. Crushed gladiolas, orchids, roses, marigolds and lilies blended together, creating dense and vivid fields of complex color. In Mumbai, Letinsky made pictures of flower petals left behind on the streets following celebratory wedding nights. With her camera aimed straight down she created pure abstractions of texture and color.

In Letinsky and Morabito words: “Last night’s flowers, digitally apprehended, are cast out of an Eden remembered, and brought home to the loom. The shutter’s click is joined by a wooden whirr as the shuttle plies back and forth. Line by line, the digital screen is consumed by lapis blues, acid yellows, and putrescent greens. Those wool threads, loose and tangled, are mired amongst the flowers (redolent with their perfumes and high noon sweat).”

Weaving together richly hued cotton and wool thread, Morabito translated Letinsky’s digital abstractions into lusciously colored painterly tapestries. In contrast to the sharp delineation of forms so typical of photographic prints, the tapestries present abstract yet tactile visual fields that connect us back to moments viscerally felt. Expressed through a wide range of brilliantly colored threads, the works explore the tensions between beauty, fragility and loss.

Laura Letinsky was born in 1962 in Winnipeg, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 1991. Since 1994, she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at FOAM, Amsterdam; PhotoEspaña, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Denver Art Museum; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Public collections featuring Letinsky’s work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Art Gallery. She has received numerous awards, including the Canada Council International Residency (2014); Richard Driehaus Foundation Award (2003); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002) and the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2000). Publications include To Want for Nothing, ROMAN NVMERALS, 2019; Time’s Assignation, Radius Books, 2018; Ill Form and Void Full, Radius Books, 2014; After All, Damiani, 2010; Hardly More Than Ever, Renaissance Society, 2004 and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000.

John Paul Morabito is Faculty in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at numerous international venues, including Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY; Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Boston; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago; RabbitHoleStudio Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY and Local Lore Museum, Kherson, Ukraine.