Kitchen Corner

Samuel Roy-Bois

Topham Brown Memorial Gallery
January 8, 2026 to March 11, 2026

Kitchen Corner is the title of a Depression-era photograph by Walker Evans. While not a
direct source for the works assembled here, its rediscovery during the preparation of this
exhibition proved resonant. Evans’s image operates as a portrait of a context articulated
through objects. Documentary in nature, it renders a modest interior where things—a frayed
rag, a slanted broom, a patinated chair—assume the status of characters seemingly asking to
be observed, “objects in a moment of pause between use.”¹ What is striking, however, is
that Kitchen Corner withholds the very signifiers conventionally associated with a kitchen
(no sink, no stove). In this disjunction between title and referent, the photograph underscores
the complexity of representation and the capacity of objects to exceed their functional
identity.

The works in this exhibition similarly dwell in thresholds of recognition. They position
objects, sculptures, and bodies in states of indeterminacy: what reads as structure functions as
support; what appears fragmentary gestures toward wholeness; what suggests immediacy
proves resistant, even opaque. Produced over the course of eighteen months, these works
were not initially conceived as a unified installation. Their subsequent convergence, however,
revealed affinities of form and sensibility, generating conditions for thought and affect that
exceed the sum of individual pieces.

The works composing this exhibition invite tension into the domain of the built environment.
Each references architecture obliquely: through the evocation of house foundations, the
abstracted language of the maquette, or vestiges of timber-frame construction. Despite their
varied scales and spatial logics, they converge around a shared problematic: the negotiation
between the self and the possible. In their oscillation between recognition and estrangement,
they foreground the contingencies of agency and the fragility of ideals. Failure, unfulfillment,
and speculation emerge not as deficiencies but as constitutive modes of experience, opening
onto a broader meditation on how subjectivity is continually shaped, unsettled, and redefined
through material encounter.

¹ Richon, Olivier. Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner. MIT Press, 2019.