Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to present Sands Through an Hourglass, a group exhibition featuring the work of Layo Bright, Reeha Lim, Kemi Onabulé, Roksana Pirouzmand, and Mariana Ramos Ortiz. Across practices rooted in silk painting, glass, sand, ceramics, and narrative painting, these five artists reflect on the layered complexities of identity, cultural displacement, and the evolving meaning of home.

The exhibition title gestures not only toward the passage of time, but also to transition and transference—a slipping from one side to another that may appear identical, yet is subtly altered. This permeable space, where change is constant and memory is in motion, echoes through each of the artists’ practices.

Luminous glass busts by Layo Bright’s reimagine the Nigerian Shuku hairstyle as braided amber towers that honor ancestry, beauty, and cultural pride. A work titled Dawn draws on West African design and Ife sculptures to evoke quiet defiance and resilience in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder, with colors reflecting hope, fear, and resistance at daybreak. These radiant works embody legacy and transformation, where identity and memory merge with form. 

Reeha Lim’s silk paintings, made using the Korean technique Bae Chae, layer pigment on both sides of the fabric to evoke the fragility of memory and perception. Wrinkles, pigment traces, and remnants of past works remain visible, embedding a temporal history into each piece. Her ghostly surfaces offer a delicate emotional resonance through physical form.

Kemi Onabulé’s paintings imagine human figures merging with trees, placing the body within cyclical, symbolic landscapes. Her work draws on collective experience and transformation, using nature as a metaphor for resilience. Like Lim and Bright, Onabulé reflects on the shifting boundaries of identity and the endurance of cultural memory.

Roksana Pirouzmand’s ceramic figures—kneeling, hollowed, and intertwined—inhabit the liminal space between exile and belonging. Gestures of care and burden blur: a figure supports another; bodies become steps or anchors. These shared forms of grief and support evoke a collective migratory experience.

Mariana Ramos Ortiz uses sand as both material and metaphor, crafting architectural fragments inspired by Puerto Rico’s built environment. Her ephemeral structures resist erasure, acting as repositories of history and resilience. Sand becomes a witness—shifting yet enduring—mirroring the impermanent yet lasting impact of diasporic memory.

Together, these artists tap into a place where personal and collective histories are held and transmitted through the body, memory, and material. Drawing from diasporic experience, this exhibition maps an emotional and psychological landscape shaped by movement, resilience, and transformation—creating a place of loss transformed into fertile ground for possibility, where renewal blooms, resilience whispers, and cultural memory endures like an unbroken tide.

For press inquiries or more information, please contact: hello@mrsgallery.com