Jessica Labatte

Lives and works in Winfield, IL, USA

Artist statement

The works in Shade Garden champions beauty in the everyday as a radical gesture in our contemporary moment. The images explore photographic notions of the visible and invisible, the present and withdrawn. Shade Garden includes two interrelated series of color photographs. The first series is a group of floral still lives. Small and medium sized prints alongside monumentally scaled prints. Marking temporality in the everyday domestic space of the artist’s home and garden, I photographs every flower that blooms over the course of one growing season. The pictures incorporate indexes of nurturing and domestic space amongst the clutter of objects and materials that accompany parenthood and artistic practice. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists these works 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 these 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 Lazlo Moholy Nagy, these works meditate on color, time, and sensation as an alternative present within the everyday. To create these brightly colored images, I use film and a large format camera to capture multiple exposures of collaged color paper. This...

Artwork