Working Title is a solo exhibition of egg tempera paintings by Derek Ayres that reimagines Renaissance and Baroque compositions within the weird, wood-paneled psyche of 1970s America. Sourced from lesser-known works in the Prado, Rijksmuseum, Uffizi, and the Louvre, each piece is conceptually reimagined by Ayres.

The paintings restage classical figures and still lifes inside Nixon-era interiors—polyester-clad, lit by fluorescents, and stocked with processed food. A spread of Tang, Fruity Pebbles, and Jimmy Dean stands in for a symbolic still life of the Dutch Golden Age; a striking woman with a late-stage beehive snaps a temporally glitched selfie, engulfed in Kubrickesque wallpaper and clashing attire; a maladroit bon vivant with a louche mustache raises his glass beside a steaming TV dinner, caught between celebrating and enduring the moment; a track-suited couple is frozen in anachronistic reverence—a classical sense of form and gesture rendered part suburban ballet, part mythological rerun, against a backdrop of shag carpet and wood paneling. These scenes feel frozen mid-sentence—rituals suspended in a culture that can’t quite let go.

The series explores how personal and collective memory distort and preserve the past, filtered through both fine art and pop detritus. It stages a collapse between high and low: sacred techniques like egg tempera meet convenience-store iconography. Nostalgia here isn’t comfort—it’s critique. Time folds in on itself, collapsing Renaissance grace into a haze of polyester and postwar disillusionment.

These aren’t parodies. They’re devotional and delusional in equal measure. The result is lush, theatrical, and unnervingly familiar. Working Title doesn’t ask viewers to laugh or recoil—it just leaves the lights on.