THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to present Just Looking, the first solo exhibition in Asia by artist Sarah Fripon. It is an exhibition that invites viewers to linger on the overlooked fragments of daily life—cash bills, coffee cups, hygiene products—and reconsider their embedded meanings. Her paintings do not seek to narrate or moralize but instead create a space where the familiar becomes uncanny, where the mundane is defamiliarized just enough to provoke thought. By borrowing imagery from advertising, domestic kitsch, and obsolete media, Fripon constructs visual constellations that are at once recognizable and strangely dislocated. The exhibition is less a statement than an open question: What do these everyday systems reveal about us?

Fripon’s approach is rooted in the materiality of painting itself. The slow, deliberate act of rendering these subjects—physical money, comfort food, beauty standards—allows them to unfold in ways that digital media cannot. Painting’s tactility becomes
a method of resistance against the accelerated churn of contemporary life. Dated stock photos, when painted, ceases to be merely functional; it becomes an artifact, a relic of collective habit. The artist’s use of quotation—sampling ads, film stills, and
digital ephemera—further destabilizes time, creating a slippage between past and present that mirrors our own fragmented
consumption of images.

The exhibition also engages with the exhibition space as an active participant. Fripon’s works are not merely hung but embedded, responding to architectural details and demanding physical interaction. Viewers might stoop to examine a small canvas or step back to take in a larger composition, their movements echoing the way these everyday objects operate in our lives—sometimes invisible, sometimes unavoidable. The paintings function as objects rather than windows, asserting their presence in the room alongside the viewer. This spatial dialogue reinforces the exhibition’s central tension: the push-and-pull between recognition and estrangement.

At its core, Just Looking is about the act of seeing itself. The crystal ball, a recurring motif in Fripon’s work, serves as a metaphor for painting’s capacity to distort and refract. Like divination tools, her images promise clarity but deliver ambiguity, bending the familiar into something just slightly off. This distortion is not a failure of representation but its very purpose—a way to disrupt passive consumption and reanimate the overlooked. The exhibition does not offer answers but thrives on the conversations it sparks, the feedback loop between artist, viewer, and the cultural debris we all navigate.

In a world saturated with images, Fripon’s paintings slow us down. They ask us to look again, to sit with the things we thought we knew. Just Looking is not passive; it is an act of reclamation, a refusal to let the everyday fade into noise.