Houck’s and Gilbert’s works share another comparison: they both deal in still life, a genre typically associated with painting that searches for humor and empathy endowed within the material biography of things. From the works of Old Master practitioners, like the sixteenth-century painter Juan Sánchez Cotán, to the nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil specialist William Hartnett, still life employs representational exactitude within a reduced medium—tangible things rendered into two-dimensional description—to point toward the cultural instability of vision and meaning. It has historically traded in a hyper-real visuality—a technique of representation that supersedes the technological and cultural limitations of its time to produce an image of coherent impossibility. Read More