Still Life with Single Flame

Exhibition. 5 works on view at ///after.vanish.shadow, 1237 W HUNTINGDON ST, Hartranft. The wall is circular: walking in either direction returns to the title wall. Use Tab to move between works and Enter to read a work’s wall label. Arrow keys move along the wall.

Five works at a single point in the city, the first acquired in December 2025 and the most recent in February 2026. One commissioner: Philly311 Contact Center. The museum did not solicit any of them.

The works are exhibited in order of acquisition. Visitors will notice that the subject does not change; the museum invites them to consider what does.

1. Still Life with Single Flame, No. 1 — Two-colour pigment on white ground, printed graphic, flat field. Accession 19201434. Acquired December 26, 2025. 267 days on view. The composition is organised around a single red cross set at dead centre, its arms squared and its foot extended, holding the vertical axis between two registers of lettering. Green holly sprigs mirror one another on either side, each terminating in a triad of red berries, and short straight rays fan from the lower corners in the manner of an emanation. The palette is limited to two inks on an untouched white field, which flattens every element to the same depth and leaves no shadow anywhere in the work. The museum preserves it as the first of the works recovered from this location, where the same symmetry recurs at successively smaller scales.
2. Still Life with Single Flame, No. 3 — Digital screenshot, image compression, black ground. Accession 19496181. Acquired January 28, 2026. 234 days on view. The composition resolves into two rectangles held within a black ground: a block of white capitals above, and beneath it a rounded photographic frame in which a figure stands in three-quarter profile against an unfocused field of green. Repeated compression has softened the figure's contours and left faint blocking through the shadowed passages, so the surface reads as a copy of a copy rather than as a photograph. Of the works gathered here, this is the one in which the surrounding darkness occupies the greatest area, pressing the lit rectangle toward the center. The museum preserves it as an image carried on a screen rather than on paper, and notes that the medium's own degradation has become part of the picture.
3. Still Life with Single Flame, No. 4 — Digital reproduction, compression artefact, applied overlay. Accession 19523760. Acquired February 6, 2026. 225 days on view. The work arrives as a reproduction of a reproduction: compression has flattened the warm interior light into broad bands of ochre and brown, and the printed pattern on the garment at left survives only as coarse blocks of colour. A single specular highlight holds on the dark lens, the sharpest passage in an otherwise softened field, while the lower third has been given over to a band of white lettering whose edges remain hard and unblurred. Read against its siblings in the series, this panel is the one in which degradation is most clearly uneven — the photographic portion has gone soft while the applied graphic has not. The museum preserves it for that seam, where two orders of image sit in one frame without resolving into each other.
4. Still Life with Single Flame, No. 5 — Digital reproduction, compression artefact, overlaid typography. Accession 19523763. Acquired February 6, 2026. 225 days on view. The composition divides across the middle: a photographic band of shoulders and faces above, a solid field of white capitals below, with a small red mark set at the seam where the two registers meet. Repeated reproduction has flattened the shadowed passages into unmodulated near-black and left a soft halo along the edge of the pale garment at right, so that the image reads less as a photograph than as a record of its own copying. Among the works gathered under this title, the museum preserves this one for that quality of surface — an image carried far enough past its own resolution that the carrying becomes the subject.
5. Still Life with Single Flame, No. 6 — Soy wax, glass vessel, single wick, ambient darkness. Accession 19532042. Acquired February 11, 2026. 220 days on view. The flame stands perfectly vertical and undisturbed, its light falling only a short distance across the pale wax before the surrounding darkness absorbs it. Illumination gathers instead in the glass rim and in the wet sheen of the surface below, where the jar's underside repeats itself as a soft smear. Read alongits siblings, this instance is the most contained: no draft, no drift, the wick consuming itself at an even rate. The museum preserves it as a study in light that declines to travel.

All exhibitions