In English, the term “still life” refers to a scene of living things brought to a halt. In French and Italian respectively, “nature morte” and “natura morta” both translate to “dead nature.” These point to a Western definition of life as something that has movement, while in Japanese, the term is 静物 = quiet object. This emphasis on the objects themselves may connect back to an animistic belief that all things inherently have life, because a deity resides in all things. The three artists of this exhibition— Asuka Hishiki, Sakiko Kurita, and Naomi Reis—consider how what constitutes “life” has shifted from our perspective here in the (post-covid) present.

By adding a comma in the center of the term, “Still, life” suggests that a small change in perception can drastically affect how we see, and how we interpret what we see: even as life is brought still, life continues. Centering the quiet, everyday things we see in our daily lives as subject matter, the artists’ work serves as a switch to make little moments of magic in the everyday more visible. Each viewer, by bringing in their own perspective, will operate those switches differently. “Still, life” is an invitation to see the “life” happening all around us in our everyday encounters with fresh eyes, offering ways to turn on anew to the life that we see.