Ryan Dittmar and Rebecca Giles bring the long history of still life into the present, demonstrating how a genre often associated with tradition remains open to reinvention. Though their practices are unmistakably contemporary, both artists engage with the same formal problems that shaped the work of their predecessors, including light, surface, and composition, as well as the unstable relationship between observation and construction. Still life has long functioned as a site of perceptual and formal experiment, yet it is also a deeply human genre. Its power lies not only in what is depicted, but in how the world is arranged, seen, and translated into an image. This capacity for renewal has allowed still life to endure from its development in seventeenth-century Dutch painting to the present.

Ryan Dittmar centers his photographs on the act of arrangement itself. Artificial flowers, a vintage Wheaties box, and a cowboy boot concealing a demi-baguette are staged in playful compositions that recall the deliberate constructions of early still life painting. Yet the acidic color, synthetic textures, and visible artifice resist any sense of natural order. By leaving the process of construction apparent, Dittmar allows nostalgia and estrangement, the old and the new, the natural and the artificial to exist at once, revealing how the apparent clarity of still life has always depended on careful intervention.

Rebecca Giles approaches still life through the effects of light, color, and language. Her compositions often center translucent or reflective forms through which light seems to pass, creating an interior luminosity that becomes the primary subject. Areas of heightened color complicate the relationship between object and image, shifting still life away from description and toward sensation. What emerges is less a record of things than an inquiry into perception itself, asking how objects dissolve into light and color, and how painting can transform the ordinary into something unstable, elusive, and newly felt.

Persistence of Still Life, in pairing Dittmar and Giles, makes visible the extent to which the genre continues to offer a productive site for rethinking the relationship between observation and invention, and between material presence and pictorial construction. What persists, finally, is not simply the genre itself, but its capacity to be remade.

- Curated by Charlotte Kelly