Exhibition

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Submerged Narratives

Keiye Miranda

September 26 - October 26, 2019

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Throughout her decades-long artistic practice, Keiye Miranda has often used water as a motif in her work, often utilising it as a means to obscure and distort the familiar. The halved lives in her realist work, where half of the subject inhabits life above water, while the other half lives below, signals the different ways we can see the same thing. In Submerged Narratives, she returns to water; here, in recognition of the fluidity of memory, delivering the visible representations of her own narratives to the viewers, a consciousness of what story she wants to tell.

In the particulars of what is represented in Submerged Narratives, these images demonstrate the close relation water with people, in both our anatomical constitution as well as the world that we inhabit. Both the human body and the Earth are largely comprised of water, proof that it holds a particular importance in how we move and what we move around.

Still, the consciousness of telling these stories — of people submerged in an artificial body of water, that is, the swimming pool — Miranda resituates these narratives in a controlled environment, choosing to capture a moment and to spend time with this fragment of some story she wishes to share. Each painting obscures the identity of the subject and ultimately tells of a moment captured, still lives in motion.

Miranda’s work makes permanent that which is meant to be fleeting: ruminations on one forgettable instant, moments made precious by the amount of time one chooses to spend with them. These paintings are monuments to the artist’s interior life, created for meditation and in reverence. In these moments, Miranda bears witness to our relationship with water, and the moments in which we become the people we are.

­— Carina Santos