Laura Letinsky | Venus Inferred

Exhibition Dates: October 12 - November 16, 2002     

In the early 1990’s, Laura began bringing her large-format camera into the homes of “ordinary” people, in an attempt to document “what love looks like”. The ensuing project took six years to complete, and involved working intimately with a number of couples in a collaboration that explores this incredibly private realm, made public by the photographer and immediately recognizable to the viewer.

The resulting colour photographs exude the tension that exists between the beauty and the banality of love, moments that weave the fabric of day-to-day life as a couple. As viewers, or voyeurs, we are familiar with the details of these personal environments – coffee mugs and bedspreads and cluttered counters – because they mirror our own. They remind us that the very things we gather to assert our individuality, both in terms of our possessions and our relationships, are often the things we share most commonly with our peers. If the Goddess of Love herself is not overtly visible in the work, the photographs – quietly and consistently - elicit her presence nonetheless.

While the nature of the love relationship is impossible to fully articulate, and photography itself is an inherently silent medium, Venus Inferred works towards building a visual vocabulary of romance. Our exhibition will concentrate on Laura’s self-portraits, created when she turned the camera on herself and her partner Eric, which record the promises, disharmonies and disappointments that inhere in modern coupling.