For Soft Opening, photographer Aiden Morse presents highly manipulated studio still lifes as a means of exploring tensions between reality and fantasy as they exist within the photographic language.

Morse’s still lifes at times abandon the rawness of fine art photography for the synthetic artificiality of advertising photography. While many of his images emerge as perfected idols of a consumerist society, the trained eye will detect small cues that betray the process of their manufacture. We yearn to believe in these alluring forms, and yet we cannot quite escape the nagging knowledge of their deception.

Soft Opening was recently on view at Fort Delta in Melbourne.

Image © Aiden Morse