Esteemed artist Kaima Marie is set to debut her latest solo exhibition, For the record, on Friday, September 6th. Offering an immersive journey into the complexities of memory and place, the exhibition invites audiences to engage with Marie's intricate and layered compositions. Each collage serves as a fragmented record of time, visually representing the simultaneous cacophony and harmony of memory.
This collection of works draws from Marie’s nostalgic love for physical media, exploring images as repositories of knowledge. She weaves textures and spaces with a tactile richness that transforms into a captivating visual journey. For the record intertwines the historical essence of Houston, the artist’s hometown, with her signature meditation on urban public spaces. Unique cultural markers of Houston, such as the iconic Astrodome and Astroworld, coexist with local landmarks like St. James United Methodist Church and the former headquarters of KCOH radio station. Marie also incorporates childhood photos from her personal archives, blending these elements to create large-scale collages that explore the creation of self informed by both personal and collective memories.
Each collage fuses personal history with broader cultural narratives, challenging traditional notions of biography and representation. "Images of myself and my loved ones serve as avatars of a person navigating their identity," Marie notes, underscoring her works' broader exploration of the construction of selfhood beyond a strictly autobiographical narrative. Travel serves as a major source of inspiration, as Marie melds hyperlocal and universal sources to create fantastical, expansive interiors and exteriors that immerse their viewer.
Marie's artistic journey began with painting, where she used crushed glass to add texture to large-scale portraits. Although her work has evolved greatly since then, the core themes of distortion and refraction continue to shape her current collage practice. Composed with sharp angles and irregular borders, her collages evoke those same broken bits of glass, now enlarged into shards that read as mirror fragments reflecting snippets of her subject matter. Created through an intuitive and improvisational process, Marie describes her work as "puzzles without a reference image." Each piece is a study in contrast and cohesion, with tension evident in the friction between angled pieces of paper.
