MEMORY STICK

This exhibition resists immediate legibility and aesthetic digestibility. The notion that we must safely exhibit only what can be simply understood reads as an insult to many art enthusiasts in our city—those who attend show after show seeking an experience that challenges perception, that disrupts the surface and digs deeper. Memory Stick rejects the notion that audiences are incapable of engaging with complexity. Instead, it embraces work that confronts the subconscious and seeks value beyond the purely aesthetic—a thirst born not of pessimism, but of a contemporary hope, with language evolving alongside us. For Brooklyn-based artist Naomi Hawksley, this confrontation takes the form of a skeletal figure sketched on vellum beneath acrylic, a gesture both fragile and enduring:

“As far as my decisions and memory sticks go, I have recently been surveying my life for structure and found myself confused. Looking in the mirror... life’s residue accumulates and sticks to my skin for as long as it can. When I think of a memory stick, I think of reflection and all the physical material between the different states of self. The patience required of drawing can force one into a moment of reconciliation, confronting the fact that I resent the past and future, the thought of both offering me things I'll never know. This new drawing is about this self-contained reflection, seeking—the anguish of being bound by your own form and skin's wear, and the rigor required to be resilient.”- NH

Memory Stick brings together emerging and established artists—naïve and wise, locally rooted and internationally recognized—without a fixed narrative or curatorial framework. In this humble downtown Miami second-floor setting, value is assigned not by wall text or concept, but by the viewer’s own flashbacks, material resonances, and emotional charge. The works exist in the tense of the present: the state of mind you carry into the gallery, the last scroll through your phone, the layered memories that shape your gaze. Whether it’s Danka Latorre’s gum bichromate collages of Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber—colliding parasocial intimacy with ancient visual weight—or Diego Gabaldon’s reimagined sports jerseys reframing masculine desire, each piece resists instant clarity. Highlights include Venezuelan sculptor Alberto Cavalieri’s stamped concrete bricks offering stark prompts like something you desire or something you lost; the misted, memory-laden paintings of New York–based Sherry Kerlin; Hawksley’s self-contained reflection on skin, time, and resilience; and Stan Buglass’s industrial studies of infrastructure, labor, and the built environment. Rather than a neatly bound thematic statement, Memory Stick is more like the drawer of tangled cables we all keep—cracked iPhones, half-forgotten birthday cards, scratched CDs, keychains, and old love letters—objects you may hesitate to revisit, yet cannot throw away. It asks viewers to sift through their own mental archives, confronting what they desire, praise, avoid, or dismiss. Here, memory is both the lens and the subject: shifting, elusive, and impossible to fully contain.

ARTIST BIOS

Danka Latorre (b. 2002, Fort Lauderdale, FL) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Latorre’s photographic works examine the friction between self-image, objectification, and agency in an era where beauty and brutality coexist on the same algorithmic plane. Using labor-intensive historical photographic processes such as gum bichromate printing, she reprocesses appropriated imagery sourced from Instagram influencers, fan edits, early internet archives, and shock media. Her work revisits the chaotic, unregulated internet culture of the 2010s, where hypersexualized femininity, pornography, and graphic violence appeared side-by-side, shaping subconscious biases and internalized misogyny. By translating these images through historical printing techniques, Latorre disrupts their original function, questioning whether women can ever fully escape the commodifying gaze. Her prints remain in a state of contradiction—both reclamation and critique, complicity and control, beauty and trauma.

Diego Gabaldon (b. Miami, FL) is an artist and designer based in Miami, FL. Influenced by bodybuilding and organized sport, his practice examines the intersections between competition, hypermasculinity, and the desire for physical transformation. In a media-saturated culture where images and trends move at a relentless pace, Gabaldon interrogates how athleticism becomes inseparable from notions of desire and masculine identity. Borrowing the formats of sporting life, faux branding, and campaign aesthetics, he builds psychologically charged visual worlds that both satirize and humanize the masculine psyche. His work asks audiences to confront the biological, sexual, and cultural constructions of masculinity directly, revealing its tensions and vulnerabilities.

Sherry Kerlin (b. Oklahoma, USA) is a painter based in New York, NY. Her work explores the many facets of the human condition, weaving together physical and metaphysical narratives drawn from both past and present. Her paintings often carry a dreamlike, misted quality—images that appear as if seen through layers of memory. Kerlin’s works can be playful and humorous or dark and mysterious, evoking the complexity of lived experience. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1966. Kerlin has exhibited widely since 1981 in New York and across the United States. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 1995 and was a resident at the MacDowell Colony in 1992.

Naomi Hawksley (b. 2000, San Francisco, CA) is an artist based in New York, NY. Her practice engages with identity construction, moral flexibility, and the act of viewing, often exploring the psychological space between self-perception and external gaze. Through drawing and other media, Hawksley examines the layered residue of lived experience—what clings to us physically and emotionally over time. Her work has been presented with Bibeau Krueger (New York, NY), Bio Gallery (Seoul, KR), 4649 (Tokyo, JP), hardboiled (Chicago, IL), Romance (Pittsburgh, PA), White Noise (Seoul, KR), Et al. (San Francisco, CA), Mundus Press (Easthampton, MA), and Weatherproof (Chicago, IL), among others.

Alberto Cavalieri (b. 1969, Caracas, Venezuela) is a sculptor based in Caracas, Venezuela. Internationally recognized for his monumental sculptures and public works, Cavalieri has worked in visual arts—particularly sculpture—since completing studies in industrial design, mechanical engineering, and art in Caracas from 1986 to 1994. His work is rooted in a fascination with the physical and mechanical aspects of objects, creating forms that balance apparent tension with graceful equilibrium. While his large-scale works play with the visual weight of rigid materials shaped into seemingly effortless knots and turns, his smaller conceptual pieces—such as inscribed concrete bricks—offer direct, literal prompts to the viewer. Cavalieri’s practice is a continuous process of material exploration and transformation, each work leading organically to the next.

Stan Buglass (b. 1999, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK, and Phoenix, AZ. His work reflects on industrial objects, architecture, and the built environment, often drawing from personal and familial histories of labor. Buglass’s process-driven practice distills these influences into formal studies of infrastructure, machines, and the bodies that operate them. His works become cross-sections of freeways, sites of industry, and systems of human and mechanical interaction. Buglass earned his BA from Central Saint Martins in 2021 and is pursuing his MFA at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute, class of 2026.