“We are our own discoverers, staking claim to territory,” wrote the late Patricia Glinton-Meicholas in her poem, “Staking Claim to Our Souls”, from her collection “Chasing Light”. This excerpt from the poem is both an invocation and a challenge in “We Are Our Own Discoverers”, a group exhibition grounded in the enduring pursuit of truth-seeking, which requires a determined form of searching, an inward excavation as much as an outward journey. Parallel to pirates pursuing buried treasure or an astronaut on a scientific voyage, the artists position themselves between shadow and illumination, exploring what it means to discover oneself before surrendering to external systems, institutions, or expectations. Light becomes more than a symbol; it emerges as energy, revelation, clarity, confrontation, and radiant transformation. As bioluminescent beings, how do we uncover and draw from this light when it cannot be seen by the naked eye? This inquiry is deepened by this body of work, and the artists’ visual languages communicate distinctly and intuitively.

Working across multiple media in this exhibition, Amaani Hepburn, Cydne Jasmin Coleby, Heino Schmid, and Matthew David Rahming investigate how memory, folklore, mythology, and social structures shape personal and collective understanding. Their practices emerge from the village that influenced them, their cultural landscape, and lived experiences, particularly within Caribbean realities, where oral histories, communal bonds, and survival strategies have long carried knowledge across generations. The exhibition draws from Glinton-Meicholas’ commitment to preserving cultural memory through storytelling and positioning folklore not as fantasy, but as a living method of disseminating truth. These artists operate as investigators of both visible and invisible systems. Their act of being makers interrogates power, challenges inherited narratives, and traces the subtle ways people adapt, conceal, protect, and transform themselves within their environments. Together, the works suggest that discovery is a deliberate act of claiming agency over one’s imagination, history, and future.

Throughout the exhibition, figures and creatures emerge from obscured spaces, hovering between the familiar and the mythological. Hepburn’s paintings, “Iliad of the Shape that Shifts” and “Flowers for the Fringe Dweller”, investigate reptilian beings as central figures that emerge through themes of folklore, dream, and mythology. Referencing Narcissus, she uses deep, luminous color palettes to create scenes where serpent-like creatures with human limbs emerge from shadow into illumination. One figure appears captivated by its reflection, unaware that the encounter is ultimately a confrontation with the self. These hybrid forms investigate adaptation and camouflage as mechanisms of survival, positioning transformation as an ongoing process of becoming through confrontation with one’s own shadow or reflection, which has been historically tied to reinvention within the Caribbean experience.

Through layered mediums, color, spatial composition, and symbolic imagery, Coleby creates contemporary surreal works that investigate the psychological residue of childhood experience and self-preservation. In “Hide & Seek” she reflects on the process of “inner child work,” examining how formative memories and behavioral patterns remain embedded within the subconscious, accessible only through careful acts of introspection. Meanwhile, “Fawning” considers the lesser-known trauma response in which the self becomes contorted in the pursuit of safety, harmony, or survival within dependent relationships and social structures. Both works reveal the gradual process of confronting and reclaiming one’s sense of self. Similarly invested in the ongoing investigation and process of intimacy and human interdependence, Schmid revisits his earlier “Huddle” series. The blue-toned and yellow block prints foreground intimacy and collective tension. Within these works, the figures gather in a circular formation, their arms entangled and their bodies partially obscured through patchy impressions and shadowed surfaces. The proximity within these compositions oscillates between comfort and conspiracy, reflecting the fragile complexities of community, interdependence, and belonging. Schmid further examines the dynamics within these circles regarding who has access, what remains concealed, and whether these bonds can be mangled.

Within Rahming’s practice, minimal color palettes become intentional acts of restraint, refusing distraction in favor of the symbols embedded throughout his works. Through titles such as “I Have Known Rivers Ancient as Stars, As Rain”, and “I Laugh and I Eat Well”, that reference poems by Langston Hughes, Rahming constructs visual environments shaped by iron gates, serpents, and implied guard dogs. These recurring forms speak of boundaries, systemic control, and social hierarchy, as well as the necessity of guarding oneself within imposed structures. In “All the Saints Are as People, as Grass”, Rahming examines human impermanence, that all bodies inevitably return to dust. Across these works, he seeks to illuminate obscured tensions while urging caution toward the systems that quietly govern movement and belonging.

Conclusively, “We Are Our Own Discoverers” proposes truth-seeking as both a personal responsibility and a collective undertaking. At a time when external pressures increasingly shape how people see themselves and each other, this exhibition reminds us that discovery begins within. It takes courage to confront obscured realities. These artists urge us to reclaim ownership over how we imagine, create, and move through the world.