Untitled Art, Miami Beach: Morag Caister and Kevin Sabo

Moving between painting and sculpture, the presentation asks not which version of a person is real, but how all of those versions coexist. Hold Ourselves refuses the idea that one of these selves must be genuine and the other performed. A dramatic appearance may be the most direct expression of a person’s identity, rather than a facade concealing it. Equally, withdrawal and solitude are not inherently more truthful: for some they offer restoration, while for others they can feel like confinement. Identity does not reside in a single private core waiting to be uncovered. It is continually made through the different ways we choose to inhabit ourselves.

Kevin Sabo and Morag Caister approach the figure through different, but intersecting, forms of observation and construction. Sabo’s painted and ceramic characters and scenes use styling, exaggeration, pose and humour as forms of authorship. Their appearance is not simply decorative or protective, but it becomes a way of claiming space, testing possibilities and deciding how they wish to be encountered. Presented in the round, the ceramic figures resist a single defining viewpoint: every movement around them reveals another profile, attitude or relationship. Caister’s delicately painted portraits emerge through sustained looking, yet they do not claim to expose a final or definitive version of their subjects.

Clothing, posture, expression, unfinished passages and the atmosphere of the sitting describe a person at a particular moment - alert, guarded, relaxed, self-conscious, absorbed or deliberately presenting themselves. Observation brings us closer, but it does not make another person fully knowable. There is also a wider notion at play, which is that of the consciousness of the subject. Sabo’s scenes feel largely observed from afar, taking in a wider more public moment of figures not necessarily posing. Caister’s subject sit for her in person, where a defined consciousness of being observed takes place. It’s pre-conceived and planned. How does identity fit into that concept. Bringing painting and sculpture into a shared physical space, Hold Ourselves physically presents identity as plural. The person wearing dramatic make-up at night and the person reading at home the following morning are not competing versions of the self. Both are lived, chosen and real. We can seek visibility and privacy, spectacle and comfort, community and retreat sometimes simultaneously and without contradiction.

Founded in 2012, Untitled Art is a leading contemporary art fair taking place annually on the sands of Miami Beach and in downtown Houston. Guided by a mission to support the wider art ecosystem, Untitled Art offers an inclusive platform for discovering contemporary art that prioritises collaboration within each aspect of the fair.