Laine Wyatt: Interiors

Laine Wyatt: Interiors by Aline SmithsonDecember 27, 2015

©Laine Wyatt, Restaurant II, Marianna, FL

We don’t often look closely at the environments we inhabit. Once in awhile, when our phones die, or we are snapped into conscious seeing while sitting at the doctor’s office, the banality of particular interiors come into focus, and we realize that time and taste have made their marks. Photographer Laine Wyatt has been photographing generic spaces in Florida and southern states, allowing her wide angle photographs to not only reveal cottage cheese ceilings and florescent lights but interior landscapes that speak to how we live.

Laine Wyatt is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida where she has taught art/photography since 2000. She taught previously at the College of Wooster in Wooster, OH, and at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. She took an undergraduate degree in studio art/photography from the University of Florida, did postgraduate work at San Francisco State University and received her MFA in studio art/photography from Florida State University. From the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Wyatt was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in 1997-8, an Artist Enhancement Grant in 2006, 2007 and again in 2008, and she was a Merit Artist in 2011.

She is an active member of the Society for Photographic Education and has served as Portfolio Reviewer at the national conference since 2005. She was a Peer Reviewer for SPE’s 50^th Anniversary National Conference held in Chicago in 2013 and is Co-Chair of the Women’s Caucus.

Wyatt has exhibited her work in more than 130 exhibitions across the country (including Museum of Contemporary Art, GA, Monmouth Museum, NJ, Society for Contemporary Photography, MO, Museum of Contemporary Photography, IL, Center for Fine Art Photography, CO, PUNCH Gallery, OR, Axis Gallery, CA, BJ Spoke Gallery, NY, Torpedo Factory Art Center, VA, Northlight Gallery, AZ, Tampa Museum of Art, Photoplace Gallery, VT, Orlando Museum of Art, Silvermine Gallery, CT, Crown Center Gallery, IL) and abroad, and she has won a number of awards for individual works.

©Laine Wyatt, Arcade II, Marianna, FL

Interiors

In photographically navigating interior public spaces, I’m attracted to the generic yet rich quality of detail to be observed. A sort of theatre of the ordinary, there is often a melancholy emptiness, which is easily overlooked. We find clues about our own lives as well as clues to the identity of our region. These spaces, which are uninhabited by any people and the ‘cultural artifacts’ which are juxtaposed within, together propose a kind of public mythology that has a Pompeian quality. The ‘recent’ presence (of persons) points to an absence, which encourages us to scrutinize and assign new and perhaps more poignant significance to these ‘remnants’.

I want to see what has been left behind in these spaces. I’m interested in how the juxtaposition of objects and their spaces connotes values, belief systems and priorities. I want to see if we can find ourselves in these places or if we find something more peculiar – or more interesting. I’m also concerned with creating images that raise questions about our perceptions of our values, our priorities and ourselves.

©Laine Wyatt, Barber, DeLand, FL

I am intrigued by how these spaces, in their ordinariness, are arrestingly beautiful and simultaneously strange. I record them because they exist in these ways only momentarily. They are curious and commonplace and invisible.