THAT’S LIFE

THAT’S LIFE

Incorporating photographs and advertisements of LIFE magazine during its heydays of the 1940s-60s, the multi-layered artworks of Kristy Darnell Battaniʼs THAT’S LIFE series create a visual amalgamation of pictorial references that defined the proffered values of mid-century America.

Launched in 1883, LIFE magazine took a prominent role in American popular journalism after it was purchased in 1936 by Henry Luce, owner of Time magazine. Luce shifted the emphasis of the weekly magazine to photojournalism, commissioning more than 10 million photographs over six decades. As the first all-photographs news magazine in the United States, the groundbreaking publication sought to capture anything that constituted “life” — be it common, glamorous, heroic or fantastic.

Henry Luce's prospectus for the mission of LIFE magazine:

THE PURPOSE: To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things – machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see our work – our paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to: the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed; Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half of humankind. To see, and to show, is the mission now undertaken by a new kind of publication, THE SHOW-BOOK OF THE WORLD…

LIFE ceased as a weekly publication in 1972 when television became the primary source of news and entertainment, and formally ceased publication in May 2000. Battaniʼs fanciful THAT’S LIFE tapestries allow viewers to engage with these obsolete materials— and arguably ideas—formed from the pages of worn images, colors and patterns. Woven together and juxtaposed in thought-provoking abstraction, the resulting conglomerations hint at the absurdity of some of the ideas promoted in the images widely circulated and commonly accepted as American virtues and values.