The human figure has occupied a central position in the history of art as a means of thinking through belief, order, intimacy, and social structure. Across historical portraiture and modern figuration, the body has served as a surface onto which systems of value and meaning have been projected. At the same time, it has remained inseparable from lived experience; shaped by labor, displacement, devotion, and desire.
Bringing together works by Emiliana Henriquez, Mahsa Tehrani, Adelisa Selimbasic, Natia Lemay, and Emily Pope: Heliconia Projects inaugurates WHERE MEMORY TAKES SHAPE, a group exhibition exploring the figure as a site where memory accumulates gradually and unevenly, often outside the reach of language.
In these works, the body appears as something formed through duration. It carries the imprint of what has passed through it without necessarily offering narrative clarity. The figures’ postures, gestures, and their stillness take precedence over action. This perspective places the work in dialogue with art historical traditions that have approached the figure as an index of inner life, a carrier of emotion or trauma. What emerges is an attention to how experience persists physically, allowing memory to remain embedded in the subject.
A useful framework for thinking through this encounter comes from Roland Barthes’s writing in Camera Lucida. Barthes describes a mode of looking shaped by a detail that interrupts interpretation and produces a private response in the viewer. Barthes distinguishes between what he calls the studium and what interrupts it. The studium refers to the cultural, historical, and symbolic information an image carries: what can be learned or contextualized. The body, at this level, appears as something legible: historical and coded within its established frameworks. In this sense, Barthes understands the body as a site where meaning breaks down. It carries evidence of having been there, of having existed in time. For Barthes, this evidentiary quality is inseparable from mortality. Every image of a body contains an implicit awareness of time passing and of life moving toward disappearance. The body becomes a marker of duration and vulnerability, escaping literal interpretations.
Natia Lemay (b. 1985, Toronto) Her Interdisciplinary autoethnographic practice reflects her lived experience. Through personal stories, she interrogates the intersections between the mind, the body, and space to understand how these experiences relate to a broader cultural context. In her paintings where figures emerge from, dissolve into, and hover within black-on-black domestic spaces. For Lemay, black is not simply a color but a condition: one shaped by the paradox of being both hyper-visible and invisible. Her works shift with light and proximity, moving between portraiture and minimal studies, their surfaces alive with subtle transformations. Her subjects are versions of herself from childhood, years marked by the awareness of not fitting neatly into any group. Lemay draws on personal memory as well as ancestral histories of surveillance, trauma, and erasure; particularly the hypervisibility forced upon Black bodies and the invisibility. Within these layered spaces, her figures find a quiet agency, asserting presence through their very instability. She has exhibited widely throughout North America. The artist was selected for the 2024 Fountainhead residency in Miami and the 2022 Royal Drawing School Residency in Dumfries, Scotland. She was awarded the 2025 CIBC C2 Prize and National Trust Prize at Expo Chicago 2024, with her work acquired by High Museum in Atlanta in addition to being collected by the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, The North Dakota Museum of Art and The Montclair Museum of Art. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design in 2021 with a minor in Social Sciences and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023.
Emiliana Henriquez (b. El Salvador and raised in East LA) creates atmospheric figurative paintings rooted in memory, spirituality, and the emotional dimensions of identity. Working primarily in oil, she draws from her own lived experience as a woman of color, weaving symbolic imagery, dream logic, and personal storytelling into her compositions. Henriquez sees painting as a space to explore belonging, cultural duality, and the inner transformations that occur through travel and immersion in unfamiliar contexts. The self-taught painter’s works aim to reveal the universal ties that connect us: shaped by the subconscious and the quiet rituals of everyday life. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, including recent solo shows such as Warm Blue Velvet at Half Gallery (NYC, 2025) and Philosophia at Fortnight Institute (NYC, 2023). She completed a residency at Fountainhead Arts in Miami, developing new work informed by travel and cultural histories. Henriquez continues to expand her presence across the U.S. contemporary art landscape with her recent participation at Untitled Art Fair with Sorondo Projects.
Adelisa Selimbašić (b. 1996, Karlsruhe) is an Italo-Bosnian painter whose luminous canvases live in the charged space between bodies and the identities they carry. Working primarily in oil on canvas, she stages cropped, faceless figures in intimate, everyday scenes: stretching, sunbathing, leaning into one another. Then she pushes colour to the edge of abstraction, building a sculptural, almost tactile surface. Her chromatic exaggerations and elongated poses recall a contemporary, mannerist sensibility, where cellulite, stretch marks, tan lines and piercings are neither concealed nor fetishised but treated as part of a radically honest, non-idealised femininity. Raised between Bosnia and Italy and now based in New York, Selimbašić uses fragmentation to consider identity across cultures, generations, and digital spaces. Her compositions suggest sisterhood, complicity, and the desire for connection in a world shaped by screens. She holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include Dust Bunny (z2o Sara Zanin, Rome, 2024); Perché è così difficile dichiararsi? and Non ci incontreremo mai così giovani (IPERCUBO, Milan); and The Space In Between (Galleria Tommaso Calabro, Milan). Group exhibitions include Fridman Gallery (Beacon), Shin Gallery (NY), Room57 (NY), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), and Nicodim (LA). She has participated in residencies with ViaFarini, Fountainhead, Kates-Ferri Projects, and Fridman Gallery.