Catriona Jeffries

A desk is lit with the cast of morning’s earliest light, pens and papers spread across the table, the surface barely visible. Visual references are placed just beside, physiques ready for rendering. With the genre of still life dating back at least to the 16th century, the romantic image of an artist diligently capturing classical forms is a well-known archetype within western art history. What is most provocative about this practice here and now is the act of holding still; in our contemporary post-internet temporalities, what is the significance of capturing subjects in an exact moment in time? In this moment where the so-called authenticity of both artworks and objects are increasingly at risk of degradation by way of virtual proliferation and machine learning extrapolation, where then exists the sacredness of stillness?

These new virtual technologies and their effects have not been without precedent. The transforming economies throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries led artists and critics to trade symbolically loaded subjects traditionally reserved for the still life vignette for mass-produced everyday objects. Giorgio Morandi painted the factory-cast bottle, while Walter Benjamin anticipated the impact of mechanical reproduction on an increasingly image-based society. The proliferation of both manufactured objects and images, and how they became imbued with the ritualistic signifiers of the artist’s hand, is the critical question in understanding our relationship to linear time and its influence on contemporary ways of living.

In new paintings, Ron Terada presents contrasting combinations of ingredients against a painted gradient. “French Onion Orecchiette,” “Roasted Carrots With Whipped Tahini,” and “No-Knead Bread” emphasize the formal serif font of The New York Times with recipe titles taken from the eponymous journal’s cooking website and app, NYT Cooking. Such narrative depictions of select ingredients, chosen for their provocative, click-bait potency, describe a tabletop of contemporary food culture. Global culinary fusion meets the literary device, hinting at a distilled, aspirational North American class consciousness, in which dinner is determined by a curated scroll.

Through photographic captures, Ian Wallace depicts the hotel desk as a nomadic artist’s studio. Against a painted colour field, the scenes feature tabletops as propositions for artistic and intellectual pursuits. Writings by Mallarmé pose in a table’s corner, while the ancient cobblestones of Costa Brava reveal themselves through curtained windows in another. Such complementary vistas are loaded in their aesthetic tensions, proposing classical still life themes by way of photoconceptualism, highlighting how the ever-fleeting present weighs on our understanding of memory and conceptions of a place in a particular time.

The centre of the gallery is similarly punctuated, not by a weighty sculpture as one might expect, but by a delicate plumbline hanging from the ceiling. Traditionally, plumblines are used to determine a straight line when building vertical structures. Installed here in the centre of the two gallery spaces, Ceal Floyer emphasizes the liminal constructions of open space, engaging the viewer to note the still life present through their observation of the exhibition. Elsewhere, a small shelf hosts thirty-two objects chosen specifically for their shape, perfectly filling the various-sized holes of an architectural circle stencil. There is a playful conceit to Helix (2016)—a still life which gathers personal objects brought together, not for their aesthetic or thematic properties, but for their globally-standardized circumferences.

The darkened second gallery includes Floyer’s Light Switch (Switzerland) (1992), which is cast on the wall by the help of a projector. This simulacrum recalls the unadorned strategies of Morandi’s still lifes. By insisting on the smallest gesture to conjure up the most unassuming object in a room, Floyer reignites the everyday banal, spiriting a desire for new ways of looking at the most familiar of scenes, wherein an absence reinserts a presence.

Backlit by golden lights, two sculptures by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw house a selection of silver pears and a sheaf of wheat. The works reference neoclassical architecture in miniature, their forms holding the harvests like a shrine. This reductive classicism also appears in the frame of father’s son (2018), wherein a man composed of simple shapes holds a small bottle on his lap. The image is echoed again in a second wall work, this time cast and pigmented with iron powder. Utilizing both constructivist imagery and a social realist sensibility towards the materials and their styling, the works project an anthropomorphized relationship, complicating what, if any, humanistic traits remain within objecthood. In the cast vignette, this tender gesture is permanently rendered, monumentalizing the emotion within a passing second.

If the act of holding still disrupts linear time—providing momentary respite to the ongoing expenditure of objects and organic bodies—then the resulting tableau scrutinizes the meaning within overlooked liminal spaces. The depreciation of material objects in our contemporary landscape, which increasingly values virtual encounters with the real-world, often overrides the meaning of objecthood. In this way, Morandi’s still lifes were perhaps an early symptom of the post-internet, post-capitalist world that we currently inhabit, a world in which dinner is inspired from the iPad, travel accommodations are booked through a metasearch engine, outmoded technologies are cast as affective markers, and inanimate figures project human emotion. Amidst the effects of digital immediacy on our everyday combined with conflicts and growing economic inequities around the globe, it is perhaps the most unassuming parts of our lives which contain the most meaning.

Ceal Floyer (b. 1968, Pakistan; lives/works: Berlin) studied at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2006, Floyer was nominated for the Nam June Paik Award and in 2007, for the Berlin-based Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst. Selected solo exhibitions include Base Progetti per l’Arte, Florence (2022); goeben Berlin (2021); Y8 Kunstraum, Hamburg (2020); Kunsthal 44Møen, Askeby (2019); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Michigan (2019); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2018); Aspen Art Museum (2016); Aargauer Kunsthaus (2016); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); Museion, Bolzano (2014); Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven (2013); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); CCA, Tel Aviv (2011); DHC/ART, Montreal (2011); Museum of Modern Art (MOCA), KW Institute For Contemporary Art, Berlin (2009), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2009). Floyer participated in Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016), dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012), and in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw (b. 1987, Edmonton, Treaty 6; lives/works: Berlin) studied at The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. He participated in the Berlin Program for Artists. Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Wschód, Warsaw (2025, 2021); Towards, Toronto (2024, 2017); Frieze London (2024); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2023); BPA// Raum, Berlin (2022); Liste, Basel (2021); and Ashley, Berlin (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Kunstverein Gastgarten, Hamburg (2025); Wschód, Warsaw (2023); Studio for Artistic Research, Düsseldorf (2022); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021); Union Pacific, London (2020); The Loon, Toronto (2019); and Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2018).

Ron Terada (b. 1969, Vancouver; lives/works: Vancouver) has developed a wide-ranging conceptual art practice over three decades that frequently makes use of textual appropriation to explore the circulation and consumption of information in popular, journalistic, and artistic contexts. Terada’s significant solo exhibitions include The Power Plant, Toronto (2023); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, UK; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2010); and Ikon Eastside, Birmingham (2006). Recent group exhibitions include the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2024); The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2023); Vancouver Art Gallery (2021, 2017); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2019); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2017); Kunsthalle Wien (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2013); 4th Guangzhou Triennial (2012); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2012); and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2010, 2009). In 2006, he was awarded the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, Visual Art, from the Canada Council for the Arts, and in 2004, he won the VIVA Award, Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver.

Since 1965, Ian Wallace (b. 1943, Shoreham, England; lives/works: Vancouver) has been active as an exhibiting artist, writer, and educator. He has been an influential figure in the development of an internationally acknowledged photographic and conceptual approach to artistic practice. Wallace has presented numerous international solo exhibitions, including at Greta Meert, Brussels (2022); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2021, 2015, 2012); Parra & Romero, Madrid (2019); the Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver (2017); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2015); Vancouver Art Gallery (2012, 1988, 1979); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2010); Kunsthalle Zurich, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2008). He has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Sprengel Museum Hannover (2021); Kunsthalle Wien (2018); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2015); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2014); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2010); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2008); Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (2006); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (2005); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2004); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995).

Documentation by Rachel Topham Photography.