Saskia
Lethin





Saskia Lethin’s work is about permanence, hindsight, and chronology. She uses an analog photographic practice to collect material for sequence, which is her primary focus. The counterintuitive nature of Lethin’s reliance on and resistance to the archive is key to everything that she does, as she uses materials like newsprint and wax to challenge preservational impulses. Symbols of changing seasons and the use of an accordion fold are also recurring elements of Lethin’s books where she relies on cycles, organic and otherwise, as touchpoints for loose narratives.  

In “Rigorous Sap,” Lethin explores the cascading motions of familial archives through observations of her mother’s own record-keeping. Her mother’s methods are pragmatic and Lethin’s are impulsive, yet they share a sense of urgency to save each moment before the berries reach the table. In “Rigorous Sap,” Lethin adorns the space with three framed and centerfold newsprint photographs of moments that could only have been minutes apart to suggest that not even the most compulsive documentation can stop the clock.

“September October” is an accordion fold book structured around the photographs with pages that fold at varied aspect ratios. Lethin arranges the body of black and white images to tell a familiar story of autumn: forgetting to savor last bits of sunlight or commit shades of green to memory before everything fades into winter. As more people flip through it, the newsprint pages deteriorate from light and touch.

Born and raised in New York City, Lethin now resides in Illinois and recently received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.