Split Bodies, Unstable Flesh
Installation view of In This Here Place, We Flesh, 2025. Left: Aineki Traverso, A Sweet Summer Afternoon, 2025. Oil on canvas, 36 x 144 inches. Right: Shiri Mordechay, Between Thoughts, 2022. Watercolors on paper, 89 x 114 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and Gallery 495.
In This Here Place, We Flesh at Gallery 495 positions the work of Shiri Mordechay, Aineki Traverso, and Nkechi Ebubedike in a study of flesh unsettled. Curator Maty Sall frames flesh as both burden and possibility, the exhibition’s title borrowed from a rapturous sermon in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Rather than fixed narratives, the exhibition offers bodies in dissolution, distortion, and recomposition. Color, form, and scale move restlessly through the gallery. They dance, split, disjoin. They dissolve into the landscape, fracturing under tension, mutating toward the grotesque. What emerges is not resolution, but the persistence: bodies marked by violence yet refusing to disappear. The narrative coheres, then segments, then multiplies. Reality holds only as firmly as the eyes that return your gaze.
Aineki Traverso, Sub Specie Aeterni (detail), 2025. Oil on paper 3 x 4 in each, (approx.). Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 495.
Aineki Traverso’s Sub Specie Aeterni (2025) consists of fifty-one small oil-on-paper compositions installed in a single horizontal band that wraps across three gallery walls. The line reads as continuous (although being sold individually), and the long, short, long wall lengths give it the illusion of an arc. Individually intimate, collectively expansive, this curvature equates to scanning a room, the gaze surveying you. Elsewhere, Traverso paints ovals and x’s that teeter between symbolic notation and the impression of flesh under pressure. At times, the works carry an erotic charge—a tapered form pushes into a rounded, plush pink arc; in another, a pair of eyes stare back, unsettling the specter of voyeurism and turning the gaze back onto the viewer. Her larger canvas, A Sweet Summer Afternoon (2025), intertwines figure and landscape more directly. A woman sips coffee and a cacophony of scenery unfolds around her. The work dissolves the distinction between the imaginary and reality. It feels as though her thoughts are spinning about her, but it's more than the present; it’s the past and the future. In the end, Traverso situates the psyche as porous, a site where body and landscape are inseparable.
Adjacent, Shiri Mordechay’s Between Thoughts (2022) stages a feverish landscape of characters and animals suspended in watercolor’s delicate washes. At first glance, soft bulbs strung across the composition conjure a sense of domestic nostalgia, yet the figures quickly unravel that comfort. Faces morph into doll-like visages, their glassy eyes glistening with an eerie vitality. Soft pinks blush their cheeks and lips. Rows of dismembered heads that are pulled taut mimic the braids on other figures. The picture plane is constantly edging between ornament and violence. A ram appears amid the tangle, its presence steeped in menace, with other animals slipping into view with unsettling force. Mordechay wields watercolor with both precision and abandon, heightening the ephemerality of the scene and its undercurrent of dread.
Shiri Mordechay, Shore Leave, 2021. Watercolors on paper, 24 x 22 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 495.
In Shore Leave (2021), the horror shifts toward the sea. Figures cluster along the shoreline, grappling with several grotesquely oversized fish whose slack bodies threaten to engulf them. One figure reclines perilously close to drowning, overtaken by the monstrous energy that circulates among the group. Deep hues of blue capture the endless depths of the ocean and create a foreboding taunt, its uneasiness against the figures recalling long histories of violence that unfold along coasts. Mordechay’s paintings channel trauma as something both intimate and collective: a spectacle of bodies enmeshed in psychic and historical disturbance.
Geometric and figurative in equal measure, Nkechi Ebubedike’s compositions anchor the exhibition’s rhythm between Traverso’s porous landscapes and Mordechay’s grotesque watercolors. Her paintings often situate figures at the thresholds of domestic spaces: the edge of a room, doorway, in a yard. In Woman on Stakes II (2025), collage, wood, mylar, and acrylic converge to form an intimate scene at home. The central figure arches precariously, defying gravity, her weight held aloft by wooden stakes that double as both support and trap. Her body remains legible, but the fragmentation and splitting of the figure slide into abstraction. Below her, a woman’s bust rests on the floor, breasts exposed and splayed on the patterned floor. The floor and the general warmth of the space give the notion that these two know each other, and that they know each other quite well. Ebubedike frames the domestic interior as a site where the body is pulled apart and reassembled, a metaphor for the oppression and intimacy of inhabiting space. Her works turn the home, which is often idealized as a sanctuary denying the hidden labor, into a negotiation between the psychic and the corporeal.
Nkechi Ebubedike, Woman on Stakes II, 2025. Acrylic, mylar, wood, collage on paper, 42 x 42 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery 495.
Offering a state of suspension, the stories depicted belong to neither beginning nor end. The body is witnessed within landscape, the home, and in relation to the gaze of others. The figures twist and turn; they yearn. Desire and dread thread together. Tapped into the unease of corporeality, Mordechay, Traverso, and Ebubedike bring flesh to a breaking point, and Sall holds them there. The body is never whole. It’s always unsettled, always at risk—and to what end, if any?
In This Here Place, We Flesh is on view at Gallery 495 from July 19 through October 4, 2025.
