Still Life recreates a display of German artillery shells documented in an amazing color photograph taken by the French army during the last two years of World War I. Pouyan found the image while researching that conflagration, one characterized by unprecedented devastation, bloodshed and loss of life resulting from the untimely combination of new, powerful weaponry and dated battlefield tactics/military strategy. In this rare vintage photograph twelve artillery shells of different calibers, shapes, widths and heights, each standing upright on its flat end, crowd a smallish tabletop—a floral tablecloth covering its surface. Five nose fuses are neatly lined up in a row on the table’s front left area. The distribution of objects on the tabletop is clearly intentional and precisely thought out. This careful composition combined with the image’s warm sepia tone, muted colors and soft focus make it less reminiscent of war photography than a painted still life by the 18th-century French master Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin or the twentieth-century Italian Giorgio Morandi. One shell in particular, at the center of the arrangement, looks strikingly like a vase, a small lip-like flare crowing its pointed top.
Pouyan painstakingly recreates this array of objects in ceramic translating a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional composition back into a three-dimensional installation. Little details, grooves and bands at the bottom of the shells, notches or tabs on the shell’s pointed end, are subtly emphasized, rendering them almost decorative. Through accident or design the reproductions are somewhat squatter than the originals, and somewhat resemble domes. The new material, more brittle and vulnerable than the metal of the original shells, also exaggerates some of the aesthetic transformations initiated by the soft patina of the vintage photograph. On one hand, the object composition becomes less a display of trophies from or remnants of a devastating war than a formal study of the relationship between objects, an investigation of ratios, scales, shapes, and tones. On the other, the still life as vanitas or memento mori, as a visual meditation on the transience of all things earthly and the inevitability of death, is supplanted by the somewhat more sinister domestication, through an aestheticized mode of display, of instruments of death.