Gerry Bannan
Ori Gersht
David Halliday
Jennifer L. Hand
Laura Letinsky
Tim O’Kane
Agniet Snoep

Juxtaposing tradition with innovation, this exhibition presents painting, photography, and video by artists from Israel, Holland, Canada, and the United States who build on, respond to, and transform the time-honored tradition of still life through the lens of the 21st century.

Dating back to Dutch and Flemish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, the still life genre traditionally featured sumptuous tabletop compositions of flowers, ripe fruit, vegetables, seafood, meats, and other objects selected to portray the beauty of life and its abundance, but also its transience in the face of its inevitable end. Tim O’Kane (Charlottesville, Virginia) and David Halliday (New Orleans, Louisiana) recreate the still life tradition in contemporary terms with carefully composed and beautifully rendered images of vegetables and food items poised elegantly against spare backgrounds.

Bridging centuries of tradition, Agniet Snoep (Dutch, based in Amsterdam) creates vivid, almost visceral photographic still lifes of insects, flowers, shells, and sea creatures. Ori Gersht (Israeli, based in London) draws inspiration from—but radically transforms—the still life tradition in Falling Bird, 2008, a four-minute video installation. Inspired by an 18th-century French still life by Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699–1779), Gersht employs digital technology to portray, in slow motion, a pheasant plummeting into a watery void in a beautiful, but unsettling commentary on beauty, rupture, and violence.

Gerry Bannan (United States, Roanoke, Virginia) also sources European Old Master paintings and prints in still lifes that re-draw the tradition with ballpoint pens on expansive sheets of Mylar. In another twist on the genre, Laura Letinksy plays with subtle shifts in scale, illusion, and perception in almost elegiac photographic images of deserted dinner tables that hint at impermanence or moments ending. Combining sculpture and drawing with digital imagery, Jennifer L. Hand (United States, based in Dublin, Virginia) extends the format and content of the still life genre in a poetic exploration of the present moment.

This exhibition features a body of work by each artist, graciously on loan to the Center for the Arts from artists, private collections, and galleries in New York, Chicago, and Virginia.