Jimmy Limit explores the multilayered relationship between an object and consumerism through photography, which is also used as a tool to sell wares and a commodity in its own right. He constructs images that look familiar, but his subjects only have a clear purpose within the photographic frame’s limits. His most recent body of work is inspired by stock photography, especially the streamlined aesthetic of the Uline shipping company catalog. The quirky sculptures Limit creates and documents reinforce the banality of the everyday items—such as a pineapple or the elbow of a plastic pipe—that he combines into unlikely compositions. Limit’s titles are selected based on descriptive qualities he assigns to each item or group of items and that could be used to index these objects in a sales catalog. Fruit and Ceramic Arrangement 4 (Abundance, Anxiety, Balance, Citrus, Collapse, Desire, Digestion, Distribution, Everyday, Excess, Growth, Longevity, Precarity, Saturation, Storage, Surplus, Time, Uncertainty, Yellow) actual size is a still life composition that retains formal qualities of harmony and balance. Such works build on relevant art-historical precedents, most notably Brassaï’s 1932 photographic series “Involuntary Sculptures,” for which he collected and photographed scraps of paper that had been rolled, folded, or otherwise unconsciously shaped by idle hands.

Label from For the Love of Things: Still Life, February 27–May 29, 2016