A Photographer, His 5-Year-Old Son and Still Lifes Made at Home

The still lifes now hanging at Available Items, an art and design gallery in the Hudson Valley, come from an unlikely collaboration: a 48-year-old interiors photographer and his son, who was not yet five when the project began. The series, "Nino + Dad (Home Studies)," is on view as a photographic collection that offers what critic Julie Lasky calls a fresh take on the still life tradition.

Chris Mottalini started the project in 2021. He recruited his then almost-5-year-old son, Nino, to work with him on art based on items culled from their home in Dutchess County, N.Y.

What do these still lifes look like?

The works pair household objects with botanicals. But they depart sharply from the Dutch masters. A pewter tankard in a 17th-century Delft canvas invites the viewer to reach in and grasp it. These objects do not. Many are painted with colorful streaks that blend ambiguously with variegated backgrounds. And the fruits and flowers are not tabletop fare from old Holland. They include sprouting red onions, blown dandelions and durian, the notoriously smelly Southeast Asian fruit.

Lasky notes that whatever visitors to the show imagine lies behind these luminous vignettes, probably the last thing is that one of their creators was someone under 10.

How did father and son divide the work?

The objects came from inside and outside the family's home: bistro glasses, cinder blocks, lightbulbs and hydrangea leaves. In one of the early works, Mottalini laid out sheets of cardboard to use as backdrops for the images. His son smeared them with emerald and yellow paint — his choices. The boy also painted much of the glassware and ceramics under his father's supervision, and he helped compose the groupings.

Mottalini then photographed the assemblages in a makeshift home studio using natural light.

The results include a red and periwinkle arrangement of whiskey bottles, apples and day lilies; dandelions and glass blocks reflecting their aqueous-colored backdrop; and a moody-hued combination of an antler and wildflower blossoms.

What does the series change for the still life genre? It demonstrates that a domestic collaboration between a professional photographer and a small child can produce works, as Lasky puts it, good enough for hanging in a commercial gallery — multigenerational authorship in a form historically built on solitary studio practice.