Memory Frame explores memory and intimacy through the lens of the body, in a dual presentation of works by Nina Turok Shapiro and Kayla Howie. These tender depictions of the human form explore the body as an emotional core, a site of re/construction, and a locus of life and death.
Nina Turok Shapiro examines the body's dualities of pleasure and discomfort, vulnerability and power. In her Bellyful series, she presents the belly as an emotional center, our first maternal connection, and vessel of emotion and trauma. Her vibrant silk-screen prints focus on the belly-button, rendering it in microscopic yet cosmic forms. Turok Shapiro uses colour to engage with the belly as a space of softness.
In After Image: Echoes in Colour, Turok Shapiro reimagines her family archives. She foregrounds nostalgia and memory, while engaging with her experience as a second-generation South African in the Jewish diaspora. Drawing from family photographs and oral histories, she reconstructs lost narratives. Her portrayals of intimate family moments, both real and imagined, highlight the body as a site of connection.
Kayla Howie intimately explores the body and our common fragility in her series Unseeing. Her rich paintings foreground the physicality of flesh and softness of the body, standing as visceral reminders of our shared mortality.Howie paints clasped hands and networks of veins beneath the skin, juxtaposed with confrontational depictions of bruises and cuts. These wounds become portraits of our ephemerality, evoking a sense of abjection, a type of viewership defined by discomfort. Howie challenges viewers to reflect on their own physicality and emotion in response to her work.
