“There are hidden systems all around us, social, physical, and abstract. Still Life Arranged by a Demolition Squad aims to position abstract painting as a tool used to explore the bland, mundane, and temporal nature of everyday aesthetics. These sensibilities aim to synthesize the visual language of ruins, weathered surfaces, and visual peculiarities in an indexical manner. The process of the grid offers a comparison to ‘false work’, a construction term referring to a temporary structure used to support a permanent structure until it can support itself. In the same way the grid present in ‘Large Structure 01’ and ‘Large Structure 02’, serves to support permanent and formal elements in an organized way, employed to make the pictorial space operate with a digestible logic. Still Life Arranged by a Demolition SquadText Written by: Evan D’AllevaLetters from the mouth of Hogtown, sourced from the cave walls of the TTC, four years of sainthood, pickled ginger-tinged tears in the belly of the Chinatown Centre, doing circles around pigs, doing donuts, cooking hideous cannibal chickens by the sewage of the Beaches, flashing chutzpah in sterile synagogues, passing tortoise hours invested within the grid of its vivid shell, passing metal armies in Kensington and the plaster armies in the Financial District and the formalist guillotines we walk under always, all the tame wishes of an asteroid tapestry, invisible grid, dead rebellion, a coverup of a stage direction, denying ourselves the therapy of expression, catching tailless fish alphabetically from the landing strip of the battleship, drunk in the birdbaths of Cabbagetown, pacifying the hostile architecture of Hudson’s Bay department centres, feeding the unhoused with infrequent green bills, feeding agnostic artists with Ondaatjae poet-nurse, a coverup of a dialogue of the underbelly, steering a landlocked battleship bleeding out, breathing an anodyne diegesis vicariously, allowing ourselves the medium as a means of obscurity, feeling a material connection in the Greater Toronto fear, four years of debauchery, taking apart the industry, taking apart the taut factory canvas like a ballerina with their flats, walking between carbombed buses in the demented husk of a city.”