Object's Nature, Nature's Object

In Object’s Nature, Nature’s Object, Jep Dizon turns to the still life as a formal exercise in balance and beauty, as well as a psychic chamber where the rawness of nature and the artifacts of human thought collide. A flower poised in a wine cup, a marble bust stilled in contemplation, a crow perched, a snail inching forward, a book closed like a breath held—these images, calmly arrayed, hum with symbolic charge. They are not still, but vibrating with the aftershocks of living.

Each object is a cipher. The marble bust, with its sculpted serenity, stands for the constructed self—reasoned, idealized, yet ultimately breakable. The flower in a wine cup evokes fleeting pleasures, the mingling of beauty and decadence, rooted in fragility. The snail, ever slow, becomes a metaphor for deliberate becoming, for growth that resists haste. The crow, a witness and harbinger, carries the dual omen of death and insight. The book, of course, is the vessel of knowledge—open, incomplete, always waiting for the reader to arrive.

But what Dizon renders is not just an arrangement of objects; it is the architecture of a life. These objects chronicle the arc of being: emergence, learning, desire, decay. Through them, he paints a portrait not of a single individual but of our shared inheritance. For beneath the wrappings of class, culture, or geography, we each endure the same cycles. We reach, we gather, we lose. We make meaning from what surrounds us.

Set against surreal skyscapes—clouds coiling like vaporous thoughts, light dilating in unexpected hues—Dizon’s tableaux meditate on the porous boundary between mind and matter. Time is palpable, almost liquid, folding in on itself as symbols of mortality (a cut flower in a clear bottle, its bloom already waning) quietly confront us. Yet rather than sink into despair, the works pulse with a kind of sacred aliveness. For Dizon, existence is nourishment. As he states, our experiences are “food for our consciousness andsoul.”
What emerges is not a lament but an affirmation: that the world around us is not other, but of us.

In recognizing the nature of objects and the objecthood of nature, Dizon gestures toward a more intimate cosmology—where self and environment are entwined, reflections of the same opulent design. Object’s Nature, Nature’s Object is, ultimately, a still life not of things, but of being.