Put on your socks and mittens
It's getting colder tonight
A snowball in my kitchen
I watched it melt before my eyes
- David Byrne and Brian Eno
Kendall Koppe is delighted to present Between Sight and Breath, a group exhibition
bringing together works by Michael Bühler-Rose, Dickon Drury, Erica Eyres, Keith
Farquhar, Jack Jubb, Erin O'Keefe, and Leanne Ross. The exhibition offers a meditation
on the still life genre, foregrounding the artists' subjective perceptions and how
embodied acts of looking/experience give rise to shared, universal resonances.
Still life has always been a genre of quiet urgency. At first glance, it appears concerned
with the modest and the inanimate: a bowl of fruit, a folded cloth, a vase of flowers. Yet
beneath this apparent stillness lies a deep awareness of time passing, of change
occurring almost imperceptibly, the fleeting moment observed just as it disappears.
From the vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century to modernist explorations of
form and surface, the genre has repeatedly returned to the same question: how do we
hold onto what is already in the process of leaving? Throughout Between Sight and
Breath objects, language and obsessions become stand-ins for lived experience,
carrying the trace of human presence even in absence. Together, the works intersect
notions of form, material, labour, mortality, and domestic life.
In contemporary practice, still life often shifts from representation toward encounter.
The familiar is rendered strange; the ordinary becomes charged. A simple arrangement
of things can register memory, anxiety, loss, humour, or tenderness. Like the snowball
dissolving on a kitchen floor, these works ask us to attend closely to what cannot last, to
look, briefly and carefully, before it changes entirely.
