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For many, it's important, a film's believability, the story's ability to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real, its objects become realized. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in Leavitt's work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines, as far from realness as the the science lab on view and we can still understand our ability to believe in them as signifiers of science lab. At the other end, like Guillaume Bijl, the stages are hyperrealist with question of at what point are the arrangements decor and at what point it is the thing it represents, i.e. authentic living room or staged, is the obvious question, the answer is that all living rooms are. At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.
see too: William Leavitt at Greene Naftali
