Still, Life: Study of a Human Heart

In Raphaelle Peale's now infamous still life paintings, he devoted painstaking attention to the ripe colors and subtle textures of fruits and vegetables, while his contemporaries focused on portraits of religious and historical figures. His work transformed simple produce into haunting imagery—asparagus resembling human fingers, chopped watermelon evoking wounded flesh. Today, Peale is praised for his unique ability to grant objects with a new sense of aliveness.

"Still, Life" is inspired by Peale's still lifes because it performs a similarly regenerative yet opposite process — a "still life" depicting a cadaver of a human heart, it unveils to the audience a beautiful organ, one that used to sustain life but now sits in dark vats of formaldehyde in the basement of medical schools as a research artifact. By bathing it in light and presenting it for general viewership, this work grants visibility to a critical organ, a reminder of the human life that it once enabled and continues to embody.