DOCUMENT is proud to present works by Laura Letinsky, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya at NADA New York 2022.
Laura Letinsky (b. 1962) is based in Chicago, Il. Engaged in the art historical tradition of the still life, Letinsky investigates photography’s complicated relationship with depicting reality. Her practice predominantly surrounds photographing the evidence remaining of meals, printed paper materials, and other remnants of daily existence in homage to 17th century Dutch painting. Her large-scale, carefully crafted scenes often focus on the remnants of a meal or party, as she plays with ideas about perception and the transformative qualities of the photograph.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty (b. 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her recent works include multi-paneled tiled glass pieces that fuse photographs into glass through kiln-firing. Rafferty utilizes this constraint to disrupt, interrupt, and construct imagery. Some works bear the marks of the intense metamorphic heat of the kiln while also preserving delicate, translucent photographic material— created through a unique process that vitrifies images printed with powdered glass. Other materials include plant matter, mounted gelatin silver, c-prints, artist’s personal archive, excerpts from printed matter, and discarded commercial and educational stock footage. Through layered references to photographic processes and digital archival practices, Rafferty demonstrates how contemporary photography functions as a repository for ideas— a form of note-taking and annotation through screen-grabs and social media broadcasts.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) is an artist working in photography whose projects weave together histories and possibilities of portraiture, queer networks of production and collaboration, and the conceptual potential of blackness at the heart of the medium. His interests also include queer literary modernism, questions of artistic responsibility and care regarding representation and refusal. experimentation with photography, portraiture, and collage. His photographic practice depends on analog methods of fragmentation and reconstruction, resulting in complex images that sincerely regard feeling and sensuality as tools for photographic inquiry. In his most recent works, Sepuya dispels the mythology of the “decisive moment” and reveals their support structures in the broader sense of the term—tripods, pedestals, a friend’s hand pressing the shutter as the artist adjusts the lens.
