The book · Works 2025–2026
What Our Tools
Cannot Capture
Works about the tools that shape us, and the presence they cannot fully carry.
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Portrait white cover with Avery Lake and Works 2025–2026 at the top, a centered dissolving black fingerprint, and a small uppercase title at the bottom. Drag horizontally to turn the book. Use left and right arrow keys to rotate, up and down to tilt, and Home or Escape to reset. Rotation buttons are also available. The spine carries the title and Avery Lake’s name. The back includes a short book description, a small black-line portrait and bio of Avery Lake, and The Art of Avery Lake imprint. Use the Spine and Back buttons to view those sides directly; the back-cover text is also available below. View cover close up lets you enlarge either cover.
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What remains when everything can be captured?
Works and reflections on memory, language, identity, and attention. A return to breath, presence, and what our tools cannot fully contain.
Avery Lake
An artist and ethicist based in Abbotsford, British Columbia. His work explores how tools shape memory, language, identity, and attention.
The Art of Avery Lake
averylake.art
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An artist’s book
What remains
when everything
can be captured?
From the first light of a phone screen to the afterimage it leaves behind, this book follows Avery Lake’s work across sculpture, installation, moving image, and participatory forms.
Forty-one works meet essays and reflections on memory, language, identity, and attention. Together, they return to breath, presence, and lived experience: what a medium can point toward but cannot fully contain.
Selected pages from the proof
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Turn the pages. Follow a thought.
Five glimpses inside.
Explore five selected spreads. Open the reader to zoom and read each page.
The structure
Four parts.
Seven principles.
The book moves in four parts, Breath, Mirror, Alphabet and Presence, carried by the seven principles of The Age of Beauty: Art in the Intelligence Age, Avery Lake’s 2025 manifesto. It opens with the first light of the day and closes with the light that stays behind the eyes.
- We are beings of breath
- Art is any (human) intentional action
- Machines can mimic, but they cannot mean
- Creation is collaboration, not surrender
- Authenticity is not in the medium
- Beauty still matters
- To create is to resist
“I make work about the media we live inside without noticing, the way we live inside weather.”
Avery Lake · From the book
The artist
Avery Lake
A Swiss-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and ethicist based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Avery Lake works across sculpture, installation, moving image, and participatory forms.
His practice asks how our tools shape memory, language, identity, and attention, and what remains beyond their reach.
Explore the artist’s practiceThe book at a glance
- Title
- What Our Tools Cannot Capture
- Artist
- Avery Lake
- Works
- 2025–2026 · 41 works
- Extent
- 126 pages
- Format
- Hardcover, 8.25 × 11 in (21 × 28 cm), full colour
- Publisher
- The Art of Avery Lake
- Language
- English
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