Shailee Mehta | Into the Low Tide
20 March - 25 April 2026
“A different kind of hydrological cycle—an embodied one—insists that we relinquish any illusion that culture is separate from nature.”
—Astrida Neimanis
Water moves through these works as a living force - gestating, dissolving, and reflecting. Figures drift between submerged spaces, cavernous landscapes, and tidal thresholds where bodies and ecologies become indistinguishable. Developed through encounters with aquatic landscapes across geographies - a walk through the intertidal zone in Mumbai, limestone caves in Vietnam, and a residency along the southern coast of Italy, this body of work extends the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the parallels between water ecologies and the female body. The works made in Basilicata draw particularly from the history of grottoes in Italy, geological spaces historically associated with the aesthetic origins of the grotesque, approached here through the lens of Astrida Neimanis’s concept of an embodied hydrological cycle.
Ecological forms recur throughout the paintings as both motif and metaphor. The red mangrove, an ecosystem deeply affected by deforestation in India, appears repeatedly, its tangled root systems suggesting networks of interdependence and regeneration. With its striking red bark and reproductive resilience, the mangrove becomes an index for corporeality and gestation within the artist’s visual language.
Across the works, landscapes assume generative capacities. Cavernous interiors become sites of emergence, where mythologised organisms such as bioluminescent seaweed clustered within caves, appear to grow and gather. This speculative ecology extends into the sculptural brass frames, produced through the traditional Dhokra lost-wax casting technique. Their forms evoke fossils, bones, and skeletal fragments belonging to imagined marine species, situating the paintings within a broader material ecology of relics and remains.
Such environments offer a potent metaphor for the female body as a site that both becomes and facilitates becoming. Echoing Neimanis’s writing on watery embodiment, the works foreground the permeability between bodies and environments, reminding us that human life is inseparable from the ecologies it inhabits. The hydrological cycle thus emerges not only as a planetary process but as a shared condition: we are, fundamentally, signatures of water.
Water also shapes the paintings formally and perceptually. Submerged figures drift within aqueous abstraction, while shifting surfaces bend and refract light. In several works, mirrored or doubled figures appear—bodies in tandem, resting or moving together, recalling the reflective poetics of water itself. For Shailee, the act of painting water becomes a process of relinquishing fixed representation. From luminous watercolour washes to vibrant underpainted canvases, the works embrace fluidity and indeterminacy. Figures emerge as porous, osmotic forms, their edges dissolving into the landscapes they inhabit.
Subtle traces of contemporary ecological tension surface throughout: vertical markers of human intervention - rotting piers encrusted with barnacles or distant electric towers, interrupt the horizontal expanses of land and water, suggesting the uneasy coexistence of infrastructure and fragile ecosystems. A polyptych of drawings on layered rice paper introduces a tactile, ritualistic dimension to the exhibition. Referencing lunar cycles observed in India and across many cultures, these works gesture toward the longstanding relationship between celestial rhythms and planetary waters. Such alignments reinforce the exhibition’s central proposition: that nature and culture are not oppositional domains but overlapping strata within a shared palimpsest.
Ultimately, the works propose a recalibration of our relationship to the environment - one that moves from observation toward immersion. Returning to the shifting threshold between land and water, they invite us to step into the mutable terrain of low tide.
SELECTED WORKS
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Thiang Uk (b. 1993, Hakha, Myanmar) lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He holds an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD, USA) and a BFA from Hunter College (New York, NY, USA), and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME, USA) in 2023. Uk’s solo exhibitions include Middle Distance at art hall (Baltimore, MD, USA), Breathing Surfaces at Silber Art Gallery, Goucher College (Towson, MD, USA), and Shadow’s Edge at Bureau (New York, NY, USA). Uk’s work is held in the collection of the Olivia Foundation (Mexico City, Mexico).
Kuh Del Rosario is a visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Quebec. Born in Manila, Philippines, she immigrated to Calgary, Alberta, where she earned a BFA in Painting from the Alberta College of Art and Design before completing an MFA in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University. Recent solo exhibitions include na dadaanan at Badlands Art Department (Drumheller, Alberta, Canada) and An Unhusked Grain of Rice Fills the Whole House at B-312 (Montréal, Quebec, Canada). She is currently an artist-in-residence at Fonderie Darling (2023–26), supported by the Ouellette Family Foundation.
Lucía Reissig (b. 1994, Buenos Aires, Argentina) began her artistic training in artist-run spaces, eventually earning her MFA in Sculpture from Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) in 2024. Solo exhibitions include Glossary at mimo (Brooklyn, NY, USA) in 2025, 287.5 kilos at Móvil (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in 2023, Todo estaba sucio (with Marisa Agri) at Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno de Mendoza (Mendoza, Argentina), and El trabajo invisible at Selvanegra Galería (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in 2018. Reissig has participated in group exhibitions at Museo de la Memoria (Santiago, Chile), Mendes Wood DM (Germantown, NY, USA), Centro Cultural de España (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina), among others. Reissig lives and works in New York City.
John Hee Taek Chae received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. His previous solo exhibitions include Hallucination at D. D. D. D. (New York, NY, USA), A Dark and Bloody Ground at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY, USA), Shed Your Eyes at MARCH (New York, NY, USA), and Make. Believe. at MOCA Jacksonville (Jacksonville, FL, USA), among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at Amanita (New York, NY, USA), Asia Society Texas (Houston, TX, USA), The Carnegie (Covington, KY), and Visual Arts Center of Richmond, (Richmond, VA, USA) among others. He was awarded the MacDowell Fellowship in 2021 and was a Yaddo Fellow in 2022.
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Edge effect, 2026
Oil on canvas
228 x 178 cm