I remember, and I’m not sure what it means that I do.

How should I process the memories? Do I already incorporate those hazes of recollection in ways that I don’t even recognize? Did they set me up on some particular life path? What came before in my life, it’s mine, and yet at times, it really feels so… separate. The present, the world of acute sensation, is itself somehow separate, at times. So much of our sensory experience is, I think, about observing the senses on top of the actual, momentary instances of them. So, I look backwards and wonder.

While now trying to move through what I grasp as a present, am I smothered by those embedded memories’ forward progression? Their moment passed, but drifting onward does not mean they ceased to exist. Some of the memories behind me are terrible; still, others are treasured. I wonder where it’s all going, and I wonder if I should worry. Some of the memories that extend themselves over my experience of daily living aren’t even mine! Social and family bonds were already functioning — already growing atop other, lived layers of ephemera and memory — before any one of us started out on our own treks of living.

The oil paintings by artist Olivia Jia in a new exhibition at Margot Samel in New York deal with that ever present memory.

Small, and gentle in the way they meet you, the visitor, the paintings depict images, including painted photographs atop painted books and the inside pages of such books, themselves arrayed with images that feel documentary. But it’s a documentary sensation tied together by what feels like wanting togetherness in the environment of the familiar and everyday evoked by these works. Where some historically directed pondering just amplifies feelings of disconnection, these paintings — the realism of their emotional strain notwithstanding — do not. Jia’s imagery is arranged carefully, and sincerely. You begin to find yourself along this kind of journey.

I feel as though I’m looking at glimpses of someone trying to piece together a life, trying to pull from leftover objects and recollections of objects that range extensively in their origins and what remains of them. The images within the painted books are not, in the internal logic of the paintings, the artistically depicted objects themselves. But they maintain something of that to which they point. There is creative power there.

There is a quietly expanding spark, and both within each individual painting and across the exhibition as a whole, you start to see a through-line, an assembling life that looks backwards but progresses onward simultaneously. Grounding connection remains, even outside of linear narrative. In the face of upheaval that becomes routine, we lose, perhaps, initial opportunity for a directly fulfilled hope originating within days past, a progression that moves from our forebears to us and from us to our future, even and uplifting. But these events, they still happen. These people (some of Jia’s painted images depict Chinese artists, for instance), they are still a part. In a way, they still live, and hope — things I really felt here.

A sense of self emerges, spread across a collection of disparate images. There is still the sensation of memory and our experience that offers a guiding hand, leading towards what that sensation encapsulates.

Maybe ideally, but at least from the vantage point of this art, the process all points back to personal belonging. The simple and routine — like a glance towards a flash of color (a few of Jia’s artworks particularly highlight a single color), or even just the physicality of an actual photograph — seems here like an opportunity to answer what sometimes feels like a yawning chasm across the fields of memory, and more broadly, what came before. We don’t solve the grief and yearning, or the confusion and uncertainty, but — at least in this art! — we find ourselves grounded. Jia’s color palette strikes me at times as somewhat muted, but even in that, the weight is pleasant and reassuring rather than oppressive or prescriptive.

Even as what we ponder is fleeting, I still see light.

Olivia Jia: “Mirror stage” closes… today, May 31, at Margot Samel in New York City. Thank you to the gallery for helping put this together. Best wishes to the artist!

Featured image: Olivia Jia: “Mirror stage” (installation view), April 30 – May 31, 2025, Margot Samel, New York. Image by Matthew Sherman, 2025, and provided by Margot Samel.