In Autophagia, Rhys Edwards explores the unstable relationship between images and reality through contemporary still-life painting. Drawing connections between Dutch Golden Age floral paintings and today’s AI-generated imagery, his work combines objects and flowers painted from life with found photographs and AI-generated fragments to examine how images are created, reproduced, and transformed.

The resulting oil paintings occupy a space between documentation and invention, revealing the slippages between different versions of reality.

“Edwards takes up the concept of autophagy in artificial intelligence research, in which language models are trained on data they have themselves helped generate, forming a recursive loop that is prone to eventual collapse—creating an ouroboros of image generation. His oil paintings reflect this condition. While they maintain the surface of realism, they do not commit to a single register of the real.”

Rhys Edwards is an artist, curator, and writer whose work has appeared in The Capilano Review, Border Crossings, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. Autophagia is his first solo exhibition with Wil Aballe. He will begin his Master’s in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University this fall. The show is on view until September 5th.