Phoebe Little

When does sensory and aesthetic pleasure bring us real fulfillment and when does it
defy our expectations, leaving us disillusioned? When is the desire that moves us to seek
pleasure innate and when is it imposed by capitalism and other social constructs? How do the
objects we surround ourselves with form who we are? Are these formations authentic or
artificial? And what is at the core of our tendency to attach moral value to concepts of real and
fake? Through the conspicuous absence of human subjects, my still life paintings seek answers
to these urgent questions about personhood, identity, and consumerism in contemporary
Western cultures.

I portray pleasure both in subject and materiality of paint. The cleft of a ripe tomato or
the orifice of a halved melon welcome innuendo, but are rivaled in their sensuality by
the tactile rendering of a paper bag. Compositions place contemporary consumer products in
conversation with heirlooms, kitsch, and handmade sculptural elements, challenging their status
as sacred or profane totems. These objects become anthropomorphized signifiers of class,
culture, politics of production, and access.

Meta images of human figures quote art history and my own drawings, showing their subjects in
states of objectification and alienation. Feminine forms become literal vessels; a tragicomic
character extends a gesture of friendship into empty space. By relegating the only animate
subjects to flat, static background images within the painted space, I evoke the physical
isolation that’s characteristic of our technological age. The staged artifice of my compositions is

reminiscent of aspirational lifestyle images on social media that falsely promise material self-
improvement as an antidote to this detachment.

Through referencing aesthetic conventions of millennial-targeted advertising alongside images
appropriated from Dutch nature morte paintings, I bring the problematic history of colonial
mercantilism into the present. These icons of past bounty highlight contemporary lack: a
painting of an opulent bouquet of flowers is placed in contrast with a Roach Motel and single
humble daisy; the cardboard silhouette of a hare hangs over an electric candle and a can of
artificially flavored peach soda.

I often use the checkerboard motif as a reference to Cartesian space and its role in developing
linear perspective. This historic shift came to reinforce the western belief in finding objective
truth through the scientific method, illegitimizing intuitive ways of knowing and erasing
indigenous subjectivity. The gesture of warping these grids on organic objects or through glass
symbolizes a challenge to this hegemonic value system and a conflicted self-awareness of the
artistic tradition that I operate within.

Working in dialogue with the tradition of trompe l’oeil painting, I explore the paradox of the
simultaneous legibility and deception of illusion. Use of dimensional material and found objects
both heightens and destabilizes the realism of my paintings. Representational images are an
exciting invitation for skepticism—the harder someone tries to convince you of something, the
more suspect they become. Fixation on depicting surface implies interiority; obsession with
capturing the “truth” suggests alternate meanings.