Carmen Neely meets writer Angelika Pokovba at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Mexico City to discuss her current exhibition, a trace beyond the life of the body. Following the artist’s relocation from Chicago, the exhibition reflects a period of personal transition, with painting serving as a space of retreat, attentiveness, and emotional processing—an intimate framework through which lived experience is quietly held and examined.
Across large-scale canvases, watercolors, lithographs, and an expanding personal archive, Neely explores themes of displacement, memory, and the fragile act of preservation. Journal fragments, redaction, and moments of obstruction appear throughout the work, operating both visually and conceptually to address what is partially hidden, altered, or lost. As Neely reflects, “We never fully healed or resolved the problems that caused those erasures and divisions in the first place,” pointing to the urgency of preserving experience before it slips away.
The exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls through handwritten texts, reading lists, and ongoing daily reflections, framing the project as a living, evolving record. Guided by intuition and stream-of-consciousness mark-making, Neely treats painting as a form of documentation in which absence carries as much weight as presence. “The mark-making becomes a form of storytelling,” she notes—one that situates the work in the present while allowing it to remain open to future readings.
