Sunshowers for Nocturnal Blue Jays

Sun Showers for Nocturnal Blue Jays
Take a look around our exhibition! Click and drag the image below.


Bio

Jessica Labatte is an artist that creates constructed photographic images that explore the materiality of photography through light, color, illusion, and the paradoxes inherent in photographic representation. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Labatte is currently Associate Professor of Art and head of photography at Northern Illinois University. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums including the Aperture Foundation, NYC, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; South Bend Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; IMOCA, Indianapolis, IN; Hyde Park Art Center, Hyde Park, IL; Higher Pictures, NYC, NY; Golden Gallery, Chicago, IL and NYC, NY; and Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL. She was artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, NY; Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency, Saugatuck, MI; and Latitude, Chicago, IL. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum.com, and Chicago Magazine. Labatte’s work is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

Exhibition Statement

Sunshowers for Nocturnal Blue Jays brings Jessica Labatte’s photographic work into an immersive installation for ECC.


The walls of the gallery are wrapped in an immersive photographic mural composed of Labatte’s Shadow Plants photographs. These brightly colored images capture the experience of being in a 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 photographic abstractionists such as László Moholy-Nagy, the Shadow Plants photographs meditate on color, time, and sensation. To create these brightly colored images, Labatte uses film and a large format camera to capture multiple exposures of collaged color paper. Her process allows one image to fuse with another, obscuring and revealing forms, textures, and the fleeting effects of light and shadow, creating a metaphorically virtual space for the visible and invisible within society, photographic image making, and art.


Arranged on top of the mural are photographs from Labatte’s Almanac for Shade Gardeners series. These floral still life photographs mark impermanence in the everyday domestic space of Labatte’s home and garden. The series, which began in 2018 when Labatte photographed every flower that bloomed over the course of one growing season, has continued over the past several summers marking time as flowers bloom and fade from one season to the next, year after year. The pictures incorporate evolving indexes of nurturing and the endless clutter of objects that accompany parenthood and artistic practice within domestic spaces. Challenging myths of artistic practice and motherhood espoused by early feminist artists, Labatte’s photographs look to depict a more expansive definition of feminist art practice for our contemporary moment. These images advocate for the appreciation of beauty and mindfulness in everyday domestic objects and caretaking rituals.