SYDNEY.- Three women come together across oceans and time zones: artist Jay Miriam from New York, 8 Wall director Sam Houben from Sydney, and Emerald Gruin of Gruin Gallery in Los Angeles. All are mothers. All carry parallel lives shaped by care, creativity, and quiet resilience. Their meeting at Sydney’s newest female-led gallery as Jay’s inaugural Australian solo show feels less like a coincidence than a constellation—an intuitive alignment of energies, histories, and futures.
Jay Miriam’s paintings emerge from a place of daydreaming where fantasy and reality fold into one another. Scenes drift between domestic ritual and theatrical reverie: women in gardens, hands cutting fish, wine, swans waddling in courtyards, water pouring from jugs, figures moving like commedia dell’arte actors in The People Pleasers. These are not narratives in the traditional sense, but fragments—emotional snapshots suspended between memory and invention. Because it is painted, each moment is permanently paused. There is a stillness here—a presence. The works exist in the moment, offering a gentle meditation on colour and on how quickly life passes by. Feelings, smells, fleeting thoughts—our brains store them briefly before they dissolve. But painting solidifies experience. What might otherwise disappear becomes acknowledged, validated, and enjoyed.
These works ask us to slow down.
To feel the moment.
To sit with it.
Jay Miriam (b. 1990) is a New York City-born, Brooklyn-based artist who creates large-scale oil paintings that look to examine what lies in the ordinary, seemingly small moments of life. Having earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2019, Miriam’s contemplative practice involves a process of both painting from memory and imagining new worlds from scratch. Known for her use of bold mark-making and loose brush strokes in portraying nude feminine figures, Miriam’s subjects exude a playful sense of mystery. Through their considered composition, the artist's paintings are able to persuade the viewer that what is uncanny is in fact ordinary, and vice versa. Miriam has exhibited extensively across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, and has presented at Art Basel Miami, Dallas Art Fair, and Amsterdam Art Fair.
Bodies of Water reveals connections; between cities, between women, between generations. Presented by 8 Wall Gallery and Gruin Gallery, it marks a meeting of creative lineages and shared lived experience. Three mothers, three cities, one shared space. Together they hold space for contemplation, play, and emotional resonance, offering viewers a place to pause inside a beautifully distorted reality, where gesture becomes language and imagination quietly takes the lead.
