When the Sardine Can Looks Back is a group exhibition that examines how commonplace objects live, that is, how they come to have significance and meaning, and how they transcend the meanings we ascribe to them. The exhibited works, which shift between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, are intended to be in dialogue with one other. Together they seem to suggest that their subjects, or more widely, things are not as the saying goes “brought to life.” Rather through observation, through noticing, the life of a thing—a life it already has—becomes apparent. The exhibition and catalogue design reflects how things come into and out of our focus. Following strict size parameters, text grows and shrinks very obviously in some places and more subtly in others, and asks to be looked at again.