Margot Samel and Kendall Koppe are pleased to announce a three-person exhibition with Marina Grize, Ditta Baron Hoeber, and Olivia Jia. Opening at Kendall Koppe in Glasgow and presented by Margot Samel, the exhibition embodies a spirit of exchange and collaboration, expanding the dialogue between galleries and artists.
Each of the three artists approaches image making beyond an act of conveyance. Through methodologies that transfer an image out of its contexts and into new unstable associations, affinities, and significations, the image becomes a site of translation, memory, and desire. Writer Mieke Bal argues that translation extends beyond the literary. She states that visual images are translated as they move through varying audiences, and that within their exacting movement-the act of translation itself-they uncover and produce a possibility of understanding. The works on view are intimate and laboriously rendered through painting, drawing and photography.
They chronicle and perform this understanding through identifications in queer history, gaps between the image's narrative crafting, and variations in articulating the self.
The photographic moment serves as a shared point of departure for Grize, Hoeber, and Jia. Grize starts with the filmic, pausing projections of cinema that feature women bathing and female desire, then photographing these scenes with a Polaroid camera and expired film. Through close cropping, abstracted processing, and framing, the photographs leave their contexts and become an archive of female desire, out of their fabricated male gaze. Hoeber mediates what dictates the gaze within photography, capturing an image and then allowing it to sit and expand for the artist's eye until that which is essential is identified and painted over. Making physical space for what is deemed only supportive, her process troubles how narrative is constructed, upheld, and circulated. For Jia, images of artefacts found in encyclopaedic collections from Chinese past and antiquity, and personal photographs-like a wax plum flower taken by the artist herself during her last trip to Shanghai-are painted across her signature blue tableaux, like tracing clues through one's own historic archive. Through their rendering, Jia seeks to close a gap between an historical self, and the self that is moulded through the accidents of time and one's own world-making.
In the present, we are overwhelmed by a barrage of mediation, often encountering hundreds of images digitally each day. Yet these practices insist that the image retains relevance-not in what is shown, but in its fragments, traces, and absences. The image slips from its surface, returning as a trace, a hesitation, a desire to persist. What remains is neither subject nor story, but a rhythm of attention-an echo of what once was, and what continues to appear.
- Emily Small
Marina Grize (b. 1987, Sharon, CT) is based in Philadelphia, PA. She received a BFA from SUNY Purchase, New York (2013). Grize had a recent solo exhibition, In Between Touch, at Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR (2025), and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Sweetwater, Berlin, Germany (2026). Recent group exhibitions include: The hill is getting lower. Or so it seems, Sweetwater, Berlin, Germany (2024); XXXI, Athenaeum, San Diego, CA (2023); ICA San Diego, San Diego, CA (2023).
Ditta Baron Hoeber (b.1942, Philadelphia, PA) is based in Philadelphia, PA. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1964) and at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia (1965). Recent solo exhibitions include: Ditta Baron Hoeber: Works, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA (2024); Some of My Two Hundred and Seventeen Books, Philobiblon Club, Philadelphia, PA (2024); Inscapes, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA (2021); Proximity, Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA (2013); Books: Photographic Sequences, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (2007); Art Stories, University of Houston Clear Lake, Houston, TX (2003); Art Stories, 1401 Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2003); Art Stories, Abington Arts Center, Jenkintown, PA (2002); and Ditta Baron Hoeber: Photographs, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA (1993). Selected group exhibitions include: Painted Photographs, 57 West 57 Arts Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Eleven Books, Philadelphia Center for the Book, online (2021); Writers Making Books, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA (2019); Progeny, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, New York, NY (2017); Fame, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2016); Take Two: Contemporary Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2015); Works on Paper 2006, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA (2006).
Olivia Jia (b.1994, Chicago, IL) is based in Philadelphia, PA. She received a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2017. Honors include the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2015 and the President's Award at the University of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include: Mirror stage, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2025); Nine Motifs, Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Perimeter, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2023); and Ex Libris, Workplace, London, UK (2022). Selected group shows include: Solar Music / Lunar Revel, Uffner & Liu, New York, NY (2025); Inside, Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2025); Thank you, I'm rested now. I'll have the lobster today, thank you, Pangée, Montreal, Canada & Margot Samel, New York, NY, (2024); With yourself, Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany (2024); Apricity, 12.26, Dallas, TX (2023); Untold Stories: Six Women Artists in Conversation, Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling, New York, US; The Blue Hour, Workplace, London, UK (2023); To be a giant and keep quiet about it, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2022); Kaleidoscope, Workplace, London, UK (2022); To be a giant and keep quiet about it, Yee Society, Hong Kong (2022); Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA (2022); It feels like the first time, Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL (2021). Jia has an upcoming solo exhibition at BANK, Shanghai, China in November 2025.