Golden Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Jessica Labatte,and her first one-person exhibition in New York.

Following Lazy Shadows, the artist’s 2010 exhibition at Golden Gallery, Chicago, Labatte has continued to create and photograph studio constructions involving mirrors. The current exhibition is constituted by three large-scale photographic tableaux picturing the materiality of colored light, depicted at once both active and substantive.

A groundlessness is in effect as the photographs of the reflective surfaces appear formless, but subtle clues, like a glint of light on a mirror’s edge, are irrefutably representational. Labatte reinvestigates antiquated, ascientific considerations of luminiferous aether (Aristotle, Descartes, et al.) – the literal physicality of light, a substance proposed as more nuanced than air – through the systems of assembled mirrors. Sitting simultaneously atop black backdrops in the artist’s studio, these arrangements and the resulting photographs emphasize the relationship between the image and what lies outside of its frame.

Jessica Labatte received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009). Recent exhibitions include 12×12: Jessica Labatte, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Always the Young Strangers, Higher Pictures, New York. In the coming year the artist will have a solo exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.