RHYS EDWARDS: Autophagia

RHYS ESWARDS
Autophagia

Opening reception: Wednesday, July 29 at 6-8 PM

Exhibition: July 29 – Sept 5, 2026

Wil Aballe
1375 Railspur Alley
Vancouver, BC
V6H 3R7

For inquiries please contact Wil Aballe, wil@waapart.com

Through the lens of Dutch Golden Age floral painting, Rhys Edwards examines the uneasy relationship between images and the realities they seem to depict. The ‘naturalism’ of Dutch flower painting was never simply a matter of faithful observation; it was shaped by evolving techniques of representation, from painting and printmaking to optical devices, and by the material conditions of colonial trade. Edwards brings this history into dialogue with the present, where contemporary images are likewise unstable—produced, circulated, and altered through machine learning, algorithmic systems, and digital noise.

Edwards takes up the concept of autophagy in artificial intelligence research, in which language models are trained on data they have themselves helped generate, forming a recursive loop that is prone to eventual collapse—creating an ouroboros of image generation. His oil paintings reflect this condition. While they maintain the surface of realism, they do not commit to a single register of the real. Instead, they draw together flowers and objects painted from life, found photographs, images from public museum collections, fragments of AI-generated paintings, and elements shaped by imagination.

What emerges is a body of work that dwells in the gaps between observation, mediation, and invention. These paintings do not resolve those tensions so much as make them visible. The result is a body of work that attempts to trace the slippage between different frames of reality, collapsing them into pictorial abyss.

Rhys Edwards is an artist, curator, and writer. He has previously curated multiple exhibitions with Surrey Art Gallery, most recently Kinesthesia: Body as Form. His writing has been published in The Capilano Review, Border Crossings, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. Autophagia is his first solo exhibition with Wil Aballe Art Projects.

Having lived and worked for several years on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo Nations, he will begin his Master’s in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University this fall.