OUR SEAS INTERWOVEN
COLBURN GALLERY
April 2-10, 2025

On Labor’s Unethical Undercurrents: An Artist’s Reflections at Intersections of Materiality, Legacy, Loss, and Diaspora 

By Dr. Marlaina Martin

As an anthropologist, many of the themes motivating Nicolei Buendia Gupit’s solo exhibition, Our Seas Interwoven, speak to me not only for the way that content mirrors form but also for the spotlight it is not only willing but incensed to cast on the experiences of those who often fall through gaps of social, cultural, political and historical recognition.

First, Homi Bhabha’s attestation that the realities of life and living often exceed, overwhelm, and even defy the capacities of the written word. In the face of such limits, Nicolei Buendia Gupit uses a personal yet technically adept and resourceful artistic practice to shine a light on the lacks that can pervade historical narratives, especially those written by a political elite who have imagined their needs and fates apart from society’s most marginalized. Narratives, even those housed in archives for decades if not centuries, are human-made and thus must be valuable for what they reveal. They must also be confronted for the voices, legacies, and contributions they center and deem worth saving and how. It is for this reason that many mainstream or dominant archives have notable–at times, unfillable–gaps in documentation and tone. 

One of the most powerful undercurrents in Gupit’s Our Seas Interwoven is its sincere and outright commitment to the frame of the personal. First, it treats the artist’s own story and those familial stories accessible, inaccessible, and newly made accessible as legitimate in their own right because they are tales of aspirational and ambitious humanity; however complex, ideologically belittled, and structurally interrupted. Furthermore, as is common in Black Feminist Anthropological traditions, the personal serves as a lens from which to engage much longer, deeper, fuller, and holistic experiences of labor and loss, struggle and survival, finance and family, determination and death, as well as resource and recognition. Gupit’s artistic meditations in her sixth solo exhibition dare to step into the harrowingly messy but necessary terrain of a globalized economy that is not broadly thought about in terms of the individual lives it affects and too often claims. 

As an artist working across media, Gupit treads into the choppy waters of privilege, power, disparity, and dispossession with a focus on the symbolic power of materiality. Using creative practices that intentionally play with and take advantage of visitors’ ability to simultaneously and differently experience time and space, her utilization of sculpture and video tap into the crucially nonchronological nature of her journey into themes of diaspora, work, migration, displacement, and danger. 

As a notable practice in Gupit’s creative arsenal, papermaking, along with cast net-weaving, and video are material processes that demand a mastery of skill sets but are often underacknowledged either for their ubiquity or for their association with the masses, as opposed to a cultural elite. Building on the tense interrelated semantics of these foundation blocks, the forms that Gupit designed to speak to an extremely complicated ancestral history  and cultural legacy that is often strategically minimized to protect the image of those behind its figurative curtain of operations. 

Gupit’s use of juxtaposition is immensely impactful because it uses seemingly simple choices of what and where to contrast aspects of pieces to open up what are quite vast, even existential questions for many: Whose lives are worth recognizing? Whose labor? What are the human costs of the global economy and what systems maintain their invisibilization? The projected video of moving water over an wall-bound airplane made of handmade paper reflects several ethics-laden issues. Whether flying above water or indicative of lives lost beneath its tides, what are the fates of these people’s remains, what legacies and duties have they been stolen from, and to what level of acknowledgment and accountability at whose hands? Also, in naming the piece ‘Paper Airplane’, what evocations of childhood and innocence are betrayed immediately upon seeing and then learning of the piece’s actual artistic intentions? Especially upon realizing that pulverized lottery scratcher tickets are embedded in the body of its familiar shape, questions of luck, fate, and familial duty emanate from the fragile and precarious likeness of a figure often associated with movement, progress, and a determined, promising destination. 

Turning to the coffin-outfitted suitcase topped by live-but-decaying flowers, what commentary might be discernible as it concerns the objectification of certain laboring communities both in life and death? In the most ideal of contexts, coffins are final resting places purchased to honor, respect, and name the fallen. However, in nearing this artwork, the accouterments of a coffin are affixed to the shell of a suitcase, rooting the memories of these people in continued movement, unrooting, and instability. The flowers on top, just as these legacies, sit on the cusp of mortality on the shared edge of being remembered and lost. Without the intentional work that Gupit insists on doing on multiple scales (through this particular piece, the exhibition as a whole, and themes of loss and longing fueling her larger body of work), the decay might completely take over. However, she is determined not only to retrieve and remember but also to recall and relearn her legacy in and through her own body. Here, she embarked on incorporating yet another layer of material manipulation into the exhibition’s story: that of weaving cast nets to commemorate and connect with those ancestors she can and cannot name. Weaving together elements of tactile and lineage memory, Our Seas Interwoven is aptly titled for its call on viewers to more fully consider the making and forsaking done by dominant narratives shaping our increasingly global (and spottily attentive) understandings of what it means to not just be recognized but to live in a world invested in hierarchies of human experience. Furthermore, in line with the rich symbolic and spiritual legacies of conduits such as water and craft-making, Gupit backgrounds prewritten scripts of transnational belonging to foreground the flexibly intimate roles of materiality and relationality in shouldering the costs of labor paid by the very people most disenfranchised by, vulnerable to, and enrolled to enact and enable its terms.