The still-life is a pictorial genre that may seem at first to be relatively innocuous – nothing moves, and yet the unlikely collision of matter that Jessica Labatte uses to make her work belongs very much to this tradition. Her approach is admirably diverse, if not a little scattershot; some pictures are made of elements that seem never intended to resolve, or settle into a cogent reading. Each part stands in relation to the larger whole, speaking in turn of a narrative other than just what is seen. Looking beyond the surface we see implied complexities of possession and attainment, that stuff on which we build our most durable illusions.
There is also a sophisticated humour is at work in Labatte’s pictures, a willingness to embrace contradiction that helps to render the objects as permeable spaces for meaning to spread across, a game of shifting categories, playful but dense, one that slips between an amused disregard for semantic clarity and the purposefully obtuse, knowing in advance that the parts won’t connect. We have on the one hand the tactile pleasure of these images, a riot of colourful allusion, sensuously visible detail, and on the other there is the intractability of their meaning that almost constitutes a refusal, casting doubt on the reasons we might have for expecting their significance to be a given value.
Her arrangements resonate in startling ways, they have a logic all of their own. Yet an important distinction has to be made between the pictures themselves and the assemblages or collections that Labatte takes as her subject. The very act of making the picture transfers their meaning over to a discourse that is more about spectacle – about looking – than the specific presence of what it is she chooses to photograph. The wayward encounter between a presumed, but in no way apparent, conceptual destination and an intriguing optical effect, the ambiguous territory of the still-life, is what makes this work such a pleasing challenge.
Her website is here.
