Jasmine Little

Modesto Hoover Wagon Meet

June 7th - July 5th, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday June 7th, 6 - 8 pm

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To morrow will be dying.
- Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time 1648

Bowls overflowing with plump summer berries. Humid green forest floors where snails slime across soft peat while moths flap their dusty wings overhead. Impish orange cats resembling sentient croissants. Curling mushrooms and unshucked peas and carrots with their green tops and long pointy tails flopping around like fish. A big shiny bunch of grapes that appears to be multiplying like a virus. Plants whose rhizomatic roots are spreading their long thin tendrils out to take up all available space. Baskets and baskets and baskets of food and flowers.

“Still life” paintings emerged as a popular format in the 16th century, from the Dutch word “stilleven,” “leven” meaning “life” and “still” meaning “motionless, silent.” They freeze at the moment of prime abundance, flowers in bloom and food so ripe it feels right about to rot at any second. In Dutch paintings the copious fruit and fish never molds or smells, but in Little’s works there’s an interplay between the fresh, bountiful images of food that has been specifically arranged for human sensory consumption through the open holes of the eyes, nose and mouth and the damp fungi of the natural world. Even the flowers are drooping in anticipation of their deaths, which begins at the moment they’re snipped off the plant. Little’s still life paintings feel very much alive, as if the vegetal objects are growing out of the paintings, threatening to crawl right off the frame and grip viewers like a mandrake. 

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hollywood musicals dealt in fantastical images of extreme bounty and prosperity. The frame was filled to the brim with dancers doing big numbers, circling around in delirious tarantellas filmed from overhead. Everything in sight is spray painted gold, from big prop coins to dancers’ costumes, and the effect is one of tinny opulence. Little’s work references the darkness of human history and its tendency to obscure the difficult realities of real life into fixed falsified images of beauty, hope, and having. 

The longer you look at Little’s images of extreme abundance, the more these horns of plenty reveal their true sinister undercurrents. Tough green skinned melons are cracking open their veiny shells to display their orange flesh - their seeds on display like little teeth. Big bugs crawl around in the foreground, ready to spring on decaying fruit. There’s just too much goddamn stuff. In these paintings and her accompanying large ceramic vases, Little looks back at the imagined and imaginary past in order to tell the future: ruin, decay, apocalypse. For the thousands of years that still life paintings and ceramic carvings have prospered, they have always aimed towards an everlasting perfection of images unreachable here on earth. 

A 16th century type of memento mori painting known as “vanitas” contrasted overflowing collections of fruits and flower, fish and meat, milk and cheese, with signs of death like skulls. In Little’s work, rather than bones or watches, the fungi and ferns popping their heads up out of the fertile soil in shady woodlands are a keen reminder that we too are soon destined for that soil ourselves. Amidst the long tradition of images depicting a panoply of fruits and flowers, there has always been starvation, desperation, the reckless and wrong distribution of too much to a select few, leaving not nearly enough and often nothing at all for everyone else

 - Molly Lambert