In This Here Place, We Flesh

In This Here Place, We Flesh, curated by Maty Sall, brings together three artists—Aineki Traverso, Nkechi Ebubedike, and Shiri Mordechay—who explore the human form as a mutable terrain where memory, myth, and identity converge. Echoing Baby Suggs’s words in Toni Morrison's Beloved, this exhibition centers the body as a site of transformation and reclamation, shaped by ancestral knowledge, psychic weight, and the ongoing pursuit for autonomy and spiritual wholeness.

Across the exhibition, the body is not merely depicted—it is interrogated, abstracted, and reimagined. These artists disrupt the representations of self, proposing instead forms in constant flux: porous to history, shaped by environment, vulnerable to fragmentation, and yet resilient in their capacity to hold spirit and story. It becomes a liminal site—at once grounded and transcendent, intimate and collective, exposed and unknowable, beautiful and violent, personal and ancestral.

Shiri Mordechay’s psychologically charged works unfold across a dreamlike state where the boundaries between the flesh are blurs. In her intricate watercolor and ink compositions, figures emerge as unnamable creatures: part-human, part-monster, often exaggerated in form and suspended in hazy landscapes. At times animal, at times female, male, and both, these beings resist categorization; they appear at once asexual and hyper-embodied, touching on desire, childhood and the grotesque. Mordechay blurs the line between fantasy and dread, suggesting the body as an unstable mirror to the unconscious—volatile and haunted. Through this language of distortion, she conjures a world where the psyche takes visible shape.

In the paintings of Aineki Traverso, the lines between figure and landscape soften. Drawing from personal geographies—childhood memories in Patagonia and the northeastern United States—Traverso’s work dissolves the self into natural surroundings. Foliage and flesh coalesce; spirit animals glimmer through washes of color. The body is not solitary, but porous—shaped by community, nature, memory, and ancestral presence.

Nkechi Ebubedike approaches the body as a structure shaped by psychic and physical tension. Working in painting and mixed media collages, the artist constructs surrealist bodies rendered in blocks of vivid color. Her figures often alone appear fragmented— caught between stillness and distortion. Limbs extending beyond proportion and trapped within rigid geometric forms evoke flesh that bears violence and constraint as much as it embodies strength and resilience. Through this lens, the self is shaped by inherited structures and animated by the slow, complex pursuit of autonomy.