Ochi is pleased to present Flaccid candle, rising smoke, an exhibition of select queer still life photographs in dialogue with fragments of still life paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection. The works will be on view at Ochi, located at 605 N. Western Avenue in Los Angeles, California, from July 11 through August 22, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 11 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.

Ohan Breiding's Queer still life series began in 2015 as a return to the dinner table, a historically loaded site of representation, exchange, and exclusion, and to the compositional language of Spanish Baroque painter Juan Sánchez Cotán. Working in the visual grammar of seventeenth-century still life, Breiding swaps the familiar objects of the genre for their deviant others. Butter becomes Crisco. A baguette penetrates artisan bread. Basketballs are cut open and inverted, their breath-blown holes erect and nipple-like, an octopus with its eight arms, three hearts, blue blood and suckers that taste and grab, rests on top. The objects perform as codes of desire, and their relationship to death evokes a form of collective solemnity. What enters the frame as scarcity becomes, through Breiding's lens, abundance – a tableau of recognition and refusal.

Over a decade later, the series has continued to expand. The 2026 works, several commissioned by Triple Canopy for their May 2026 issue, push the series into a more sculptural register: a blue shark and a douche on black ground, a geoduck flanked by sugar and rubber, ectoplasm spilling from a fallen vessel. The earlier tabletop has receded; what remains is the object as body, the body as evidence. The images are made slowly, with collaborators, and the food used in the day's compositions is often cooked and eaten together at night. Across both registers, the dense and the spare, the inanimate and the embodied, the still life remains, for Breiding, a place to hold what the dinner table has historically refused to hold.