Still, Life
Untitled (How to Win Friends), 2022, Archival pigment print, Edition of 5, 30 x 40"
Kija Lucas uses photography to explore home, heritage, and memory–and how those ideas can be embedded in the objects we gather around us over time and across generations. In Still, Life, Lucas draws on the visual language of 16th and 17th century vanitas still lives, an artistic genre that utilized opulent arrangements of symbolic objects like skulls, rotting food, and snuffed out candles to remind viewers of the transience of earthly life and the inevitability of decay. In this new series of photographs created at Recology, she draws on motifs that suggest impermanence and death common within vanitas, reinterpreted for our contemporary age: piles of chiropractic demonstration spines, real decomposing flowers alongside eternally bright artificial arrangements, an upended and outdated classroom globe mapping countries that no longer exist, and fallen drapery of plastic bags and gold lamé. This mixture of the ephemeral and obstinately imperishable serves as a sobering reminder that even while we each face our mortality, the manifestations of our consumption and social impact will linger well beyond our lifespans.
Written by Weston Teruya
(all images in this series were made while in residence at Recology San Francisco)
