Theo Terry

Artificial Shrimp and Other Simulacra

Since antiquity, the still life has been a space in which social relations and value systems are performed by objects, both every day and extraordinary. Artificial Shrimp and Other Simulacra engages the still life to examine the hierarchies of objects which constitute contemporary material reality. Informed by historical still life painting, commercial photography, collage, and the aesthetics of digital processes, Theo Terry’s recent work recontextualizes materials and objects in order to navigate both pictorial concerns and those of wider society: wealth, labour, and consumption.

Through the layering of representational modes and the hyperbolization of framing, apparent oppositions—between image and object, natural and artificial, depth and flatness, authenticity and mass production—play out within each composition. Sculptural components, digitally drawn and cut from stone, plastic, and wood, sometimes provide conventional framing functions but at times obscure photographic elements. Combining a crude, handmade aesthetic with a hyperreality of colour, scale, and tactility, the works in Artificial Shrimp and Other Simulacra suggest a latent potential in the objects which constitute our world.

Theo Terry’s work centres around the photographic re-contextualization of objects, and the exploration of conventions of representation both in a contemporary and art historical context and in more vernacular settings.

One of the recurring motifs in his work is simulation foods and plants and the juxtaposition of ‘real and fake’ objects. His interest is not in a straightforward binary relationship of these object, but rather creating compositions with multiple opposing relationships: image – object, natural – artificial, depth – flatness and how they can exist simultaneously.

My practice is informed by still life painting, commercial and advertising photography, collage, and the aesthetics of digital processes. Marble has become a reoccurring motif in my work. Possibly no other material has such connotations of luxury and legitimacy, which is why – along with its obvious relation to historical works of art – I find it so interesting to include it in compositions where it coexists with the most vernacular and profane materials and subjects.

Juan Sanchez Cotan – Still Life with Game, Vegetables and Fruit 1602

Early on Terry began to experiment with processes that allowed a more hands-on, material practice while still engaging with photography as a discourse. He developed a methodology in which he photographed objects in his studio, physically cut up large format negatives, then digitally assembled the fragments into unified compositions. He called these compositions ‘Pictures for Butchers’.

The cutting of the negatives is a crude and imprecise process which allows the final work to reveal the conditions of its production.

Lucas Blalock – Strawberries (forever fresh) 2015

Wanting to consider the materiality of all aspects of the final art object, I began to make compositions which combined photographic elements with sculptural interventions. These sculptural components are often exaggerated frames, which sometimes complement and sometimes intefere with the photographs. Digitally drawing and CNC cutting materials such as marble, acrylic and wood allows me to shape materials in a way which is sophisticated but also quite crude and deskilled.

Theo Terry

Artificial Shrimp and Other Simulacra

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