Still Life with Empty Air is a large photographic print of an anonymous white support structure – a shelf, a windowsill, a threshold – opening onto darkness. The only other object is a small pane of glass standing upright on the far right-hand side of the image.

The work draws three different subjects into alignment: the development of linear perspective during the Italian Renaissance, the late Modernist art movement of Minimalism, and contemporary computer technologies. Linear perspective is a method of representing illusory, three-dimensional space by utilising an abstract system of mathematical forms such as the cube and the grid. These forms would in turn become important subjects in Minimalist painting and sculpture, where the illusory perspective grid was transformed into a flat, upright grid. These both converge in contemporary digital technology: 3D modelling software acting as a kind of advanced perspective drawing machine that is also governed by the upright grid of the pixel display.

This formal quality of the work is somewhat disturbed by the pane of glass. As a transparent material, glass is an object that is not seen as much as it is seen through, much like the surface of an image or the screen of a computer. The marks and scratches on the glass in the photograph – vestiges of its former function as an oil painting palette – serve not only to hinder the transparency of the material, but also suggest labour and the presense of the human body.