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.

Ohan Breiding (b. 1981, Swiss American) received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA and a BA from Scripps College in Claremont, CA. Their work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Eupen, Belgium; FRAC des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou and Nantes, France; Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland; Haus N in Athens, Greece; Dilalica Gallery in Barcelona, Spain; Galería Casa Lu in Mexico City, Mexico; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY; Oceanside Museum of Art in Oceanside, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, The Brick, Human Resources, Armory Center for the Arts, and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA; American Academy of Arts & Letters and A.I.R. Gallery in New York, NY; Southern Exposure, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Oakland Museum of California, and the Berkeley Art Museum in the San Francisco bay area. Breiding has received support from organizations including a 2025-2026 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award and a New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists Grant; a 2024 Fire Island Artist Residency; a 2024 Puffin Foundation Grant; a 2023 Flaherty Film Fellowship; a 2023 Hellman Grant; a 2021 TBA21 Ocean Space Fellowship; a 2020 Swiss International Film Festival Award; and a 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Their work has been featured in publications including Frieze, Art in America, The New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Artforum, Artillery Magazine, BOMB, e-flux, Hyperallergic, Whitewall, Impulse, The Boston Globe, My Modern Met, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Vassar Review. Breiding's first artist book, Belly of a Glacier, was published in 2023 by Nico Fontana Press. Breiding is an Associate Professor in the department of Art History and Studio Art at Williams College in Williamstown, MA and is represented by OCHI.