All That Remains
By Gunilla Josephson and Lillian Ross-Millard
HD video, sound, 21.09 minutes, Toronto, Canada, 2020.
“In a ruined temple the broken statues of the gods speak in a mysterious language. ”
A Dutch Golden Age Master instructs her Assistant as they stand before a tableau of objects forming the subject of a ‘vanitas' painting. The still life shows an amalgamation of contemporary and aged materials, featuring GoPros and Ikea shopping bags alongside yellowed papers and tarnished candlesticks. Aesthetic authority is parodied, undermined, and reinvented by human, object, and digital players. A cathedral levitates, a clown laughs, and a fish rolls its eyes.