Abundance/Excess: A Contemporary Eye on Still Life will gather works by 10 contemporary artists who draw on the legacy of still life painting in their practice. Still life has a long reputation as a genre for aesthetic experimentation, and the artists in Abundance/Excess continue in this tradition of exploration and play while also incorporating still life’s thematic emphasis on time, impermanence, and the politics of bounty.
The first section of the exhibition, Abundance, will feature contemporary artworks that interrogate the forms and distribution of wealth in American history, and to question how we buy and sell in the present. The second section of the exhibition, Excess, considers the environmental and social impacts of overconsumption. Many of the featured artworks incorporate discarded and repurposed materials, including bath towels, trash-picked toys, and collaged grocery flyers. As a whole, the artists in Abundance/Excess use representations of fish, fruit, meat, and flowers to consider larger questions about the effects and consequences of industrial extraction and production.