I Pray My Soul Is Still Eternal | Maiya Lea Hartman

These new 2-d and 3-d paintings draw on family photos, creating portals and reflections that warp time in Hartman’s life. Wild stylizations mimic childhood scrapbooking and host contemporary digital interventions. Adornment is celebrated in this vibrant new body of work.

This is Maiya Lea Hartman’s first solo show with HAIR+NAILS. Hartman has previously exhibited with the gallery in group shows “Painting Show” (2022), “Winter Into Spring” (2022) and “The Human Scale” (at Rochester Art Center) (2021).

In The Artist's Words:

I Pray My Soul Is Still Eternal looks to personal memories to examine themes of nostalgia, time, and simulation. Through a desire and longing for an eternal connection and closeness with the ephemeral, I was called to re-examine my own understanding of what it means to live beyond the body. Since I was a child, I have always spent a lot of time with family photos. I feel an immense sense of wonder, curiosity, and pride looking at these moments in time that reflect the fleeting as something infinite. I would spend many hours at my nana’s flipping through photo books of kin that came before me and staring in adoration of the adornment and ornamentation of outfits, poses, and household interiors. Observing these photos of relatives, many of whom I would never meet, I admired the ways in which these snapshots were portals that brought me closer to the people and places they reflected. I was met with the same level of interest when gazing at photos from my own childhood, even if it was just a few years prior. I oscillate between a sense of jamais vu and total familiarity when I see my younger self through photos. This body of work is an exploration of that tension: between what you know to be true and the assertion that “There is no Truth, only perception”. There is an unease and comfort all at once in the consideration that perception informs all that we do and experience.

In 2019, I first began painting familiar photos, creating representations of moments of closeness between myself and the people, places, and things that I no longer have access to. I recalled the many hours spent scrapbooking with my sister. We cut up our precious childhood photos and curated chaotic, well-adorned arrangements of different times in our lives. We were unconsciously, creating portals for conversations between each of the versions of ourselves that were captured in these moments. This would become my point-of reference for the often maximalist compositions that exist within this body of work. Holding the desire to create with the same freedom of an unsupervised child scrapbooking, yet with the care and consideration of an archivist responsible for over 65 years of family photos. Many of the aesthetic choices I play with reference pop culture and are motivated by, as Zora Neale Hurston describes, “the urge to adorn”. The responsibility to beautify and honor the timeless flyness that was imparted upon me by my family. Often taking form as large-scale paintings, these works and the figures that exist within them, reflect personal memories that have undergone multiple phases of digital and analog intervention. The photos are often digitally collaged and filtered before being projected onto 2d and 3d surfaces. The images see numerous stages of distortion and manipulation in an effort to reflect the ways that we experience memory. Things come in and out of focus, are embellished, warped, blown up, idealized, or forgotten altogether. In doing so, I create undefined landscapes where the figures exist beyond the bounds of time and a physical plane.

I pray my soul is still eternal and rejoicing with my loved ones to, through, and beyond this moment.

— Maiya Lea Hartman

Artist Bio:

Maiya Lea Hartman is a self-taught artist born and raised in Minneapolis, MN. Hartman’s interdisciplinary practice employs methods of drawing, painting, sculpture and installation as interwoven modalities for understanding, discovering, and uncovering memories and the way that we experience them. By merging various materials, forms and approaches, they blur the boundaries of typical media-based categories, creating hybrids and new ways of understanding bodies and identity. By incorporating fabric, hair, and objects into large-scale paintings, they grant their figures a sense of viscerality, as if they’re engaging with the physical space of the real world. Hartman is Director of Artistic Development at Public Functionary in Northeast, Minneapolis. They will be presenting work with HAIR+NAILS in their first solo show in February and at Felix art Fair in Los, Angeles. Hartman’s work will also be featured in the upcoming publication of New American Paintings.

www.maiyaleaartist.com

Instagram: @maiyaleaart

Open Gallery Hours:

Walk-ins welcome: Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00- 5:00 starting February 18 through March 31. Also, appointments can be scheduled 7 days/week via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.

Image: MAIYA LEA HARTMAN, You Brought The Sunshine, 2024, acrylic and airbrush on panel, 60”x 48”