Still Present, acrylic on wood, aluminum, 2026
Shown at the Arroniz Contemporary booth at Art Toronto, October 28th to November 1, 2026.
Replicas of wrapped and stacked gifts become a monument to anticipation, surprise, and to the gesture of exchange. Mystery gifts are suspended in the fleeting moment of giving and receiving, making literal the temporal meaning of the word ‘present’ by giving physical form to the space between anticipation and revelation.
A double-take moment relocates the element of surprise from the act of opening the gift to the experience of looking. A parallel emerges between the anticipation of opening a gift and the invisible work of reading an object. The replica effectively transfers the structure of surprise from the gift's contents to the object's identity.
Layers of disguise and obfuscation accumulate: the gift conceals its contents, the painted surface is a façade, and the illusory nature of the object complicates what is real and what is represented. Still Present, the title of the series, alludes to the work's relationship to still life, the temporal meaning of the word 'present', and the static nature of the eternally wrapped gift.
Straddling sculpture and painting, the disrupted, shifting grids of the patterned folded ‘paper’ reference the visual language of Op Art with a Pop Art nod to the everyday.
