Laura Tiffin

Daniela Elbahara presents Near Death, Still Life, a solo show by Laura Tiffin.

Born in the USA, raised in southern New Mexico. Laura studied at the University of New Mexico before transferring to Pratt Institute in New York City and graduating in 2004. She has lived in Brooklyn for over 20 years and is a member of the White Columns artist registry. He has currently been living and working in Mexico City for two and a half years.

For the past fifteen-twenty years, Laura has had a recurring nightmare. She finds herself with a makeshift aquarium-usually a container with the capacity to hold water: tupperwares inside refrigerators, a humidifier inside a closet, or a stage with water missing. In the containers of each scenario lived fish or other terminally ill marine animals. In the first 7 years of this dream, someone appears to tell her that the fish died because of her negligence, that she had caused it. After those 7 years no one appears, but she knows it was her fault and is horrified to realize that she has caused so much suffering, even though the fish were not hers.For the creatures in these scenarios, death is always imminent: they starve to death because they forgot to feed them, swim sideways on the bottom or barely move in the tank, intoxicated by their own waste. There are periods when Tiffin puts her artistic practice on pause, and resumes it when the nightmares begin to fade. The themes that haunt her are violent abandonment and a gentle absurdity. Without a clear understanding of what the ghost fish were trying to communicate to her, they became the subject of her work, knowing that, in some way, they were revealing something to her about her environment and her psyche.

–Daniel Elbahara