For EXPO Chicago 2025, Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery is thrilled to present a duo both from Mary W.D. Graham and Nibha Akireddy, whose works explore ancestral knowledge, healing, and the body’s role in storytelling. Graham’s interdisciplinary practice spans painting, performance, and installation. She draws her inspiration from a generational and collective origin, using the concept of the ancestors as a spiritual and conceptual medium for introspection. Akireddy’s paintings, inspired by non-Western tattooing traditions and South Indian muggulu designs, reflect the body as both canvas and vessel for healing. Her exploration of permanence and impermanence in tattooing contrasts the lasting marks on the body with the transient nature of life itself. Together, these artists invite us to reflect on the connections between history, identity, and the fleeting nature of existence, blending the sacred with the ephemeral.
Mary W.D. Graham's Value Test: Brown Paper is a series of portraits depicting fictional Black women rendered in oil on deconstructed brown paper bags mounted on linen. The work makes direct reference to the “paper bag tests” historically conducted amongst the Black upper classes to gauge entry into elite fraternities, social clubs, and events. The test granted access only to those deemed lighter than the brown paper.
The historical reference is the context though which Graham begins to reflect upon the internalization of Western ideologies about dichotomy; pass and fail, dark and light, powerful and not. The bag here serves as evidence of the arbitrary origins such power dynamics as being within the eye of the beholder, and the more powerful party. Painted straight on, the framing of the portraits foster a stark relationship between viewer and subject, capturing a moment of either recognition, sympathy, or arbitration.
The fictional nature of the portraits means that the work also reflects a process of introspection. Mining the internet for photographs to collage together Photoshop, Graham has created composite portraits to use as reference from which she rendered the women’s likenesses. Through each portrait she ponders the implications of her own intersecting identities — her gender, class, parentage, complexion, the way these identity performances are perceived/racialized in the present, and how they may have also been interpreted through-out time. As much as the work is rooted in history, it is just as much about confronting viewers with questions as a means of sparking a process of healing: What will we do now? This is what happened, now how will we move forward?
Nibha Akireddy's Subtle Bodies is a collection of paintings titled after the concept of the subtle body, a paradigm in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in which the body exists beyond solely the physical senses and form. She focuses on traditional forms of tattooing and draws from personal encounters with women tattoo artists as well as her own research into non-Western practices. She highlights tattooing as a feminine art form and explores its connection to histories of medicine, fashion, and jewelry. She is interested in creating works that emphasize the medicinal power of tattooing as it has been utilized in cultures around the world for centuries. Central to her works is her incorporation of muggulu, South Indian designs traditionally made of rice flour or chalk that guard entryways and fade throughout the day. These designs are also meant to protect the body in both life and death, and are part of a rich tattooing tradition in South India. She explores notions of permanence and impermanence in these art forms, contrasting the idea of tattoos as indelible with the ephemerality of the physical body.