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Newsletter
Still Beginning
Zach Toppin
3 Jul - 8 Aug 2026
PV: Thursday, 2 Jul, 6-9pm
Miłość is excited to announce the first solo show of Zach Toppin, ‘Still Beginning’, presenting a new series of still lives which archive the personal lives of twelve of his trans masc community members: JJ, Libro, Romeo, Wet Mess, Kae, Sabah, Helios, Yasser, Baby, Osian, Marlo, and himself, honouring the precious objects of affirmation that work to build a trans life.
These still lives become essential portraits, a personal semiotics of a shaping and grounding of identity and individuality. They queer the idea of portraiture, taking away its physical body to refuse the societal intrusive obsession with trans bodies; they are portraits of spirit.
Transness is like being born again, at the same time changing rapidly and standing still. An identity that is finding itself, still transforming and beginning, a promise, a rush and grounding, a resuscitation of a still life, a search for a graceful balance of practicality and fantasy. In bell hooks’ 1995 essay ‘Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics of the Ordinary’, learning to see and appreciate the presence of beauty becomes an act of resistance. She describes beautiful objects as ‘lovely symbols of power and possibility’, as necessary to the spirit, a way to serenity through gentleness and precision. Love and affection come through the paintings, animating the objects by a making of self, referencing a queer tradition of secret messages, of hidden symbols recognisable only to the chosen.
Within the constant journeying of transition, objects remain anchors while being charged with something supernatural. Zach manipulates perspective and proportions, tracing the shift from realist still lives to soulful portraits. The mundane becomes magical, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, as both everyday and unique objects become treasured tools of transformation, vehicles of self-expression. They make tools for living as trans in a heteropatriarchal society that attempts to deny, silence and oppress.
Exhibition booklet
List of works
Press pack
ZACH TOPPIN
Working primarily in oil painting Zach Toppin (b. 1987) investigates transness, queerness, masculinity, and identity formation. He largely creates allegorical portrait-narratives through still life painting. Interior settings act as a stage for objects to perform a narrative. The viewer is given access to intimate moments of a private trans life. Moments from memories in deep love or heartbreak, moments of desire, loneliness, longing or strength. He offers visual images as a script to be deciphered, the objects are players and the scene is the set.
The objects presented are symbolic vehicles, they contain other meanings, historical references, nods to important ancestors, messages of hope or foreboding, and through that, time travels outside of the picture plane. Fetishised items and personal relics are used as tools to explore gender fantasy, ritual, protection, and desire. These works operate as coded communications: intimate archives of trans life, dis-ease, euphoria, love, and becoming.
He aims to present a sense of mystery and wonder, for things to not be instantly able to interpret. To build stories through symbolism and cultural references, inside jokes, queer histories, secret messages, in reference to the systems of secrecy that his queer ancestors had to operate within, in reference to the threats of concealment the trans community navigate.
He leaves clues in the detritus of what’s been abandoned, for the viewer to feel like they have stepped in on something private and charged, a moment deserted. I present abandoned scenes, devoid of the physical human body, but full of clues to humanness. I come to the format of still life as a way to bypass the intrusiveness of strangers’ curiosity over trans people’s body parts. It queers the traditional idea of portraiture by omitting the figure, disallowing the so often scathing societal obsession with trans people’s biology.
He explores how painting can transform ordinary objects into charged, atmospheric images and move beyond description into something more psychologically charged, using painting as the language of the senses, of feeling, with infinitely more possibility than words, to do so. He tells the story of a memory and resuscitates the feeling of that through paint. He finds a surrealism in the generating of illusion through painting, of presenting 3D forms on a 2D flat plane, that echoes the practices of illusion, invention and magic involved in presenting as an opposite gender to which one has been born.
Selected press mentions:
AnOther Mag
Enquire about available works.
AVAILABLE NOW
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