Dominican Artist · Painting · Textile · Miami, FL
No pinto figuras. Excavo memoria.
Victoria Zeder, Dominican contemporary artist, Miami
Enter the public exhibition
Three rooms. One living system.
Selected works
A field guide to engineered pareidolia.
From a Dominican origin, through a Michigan interior, to the living systems of Miami: six works tracing one inheritance in 24k gold leaf, ink, thread, and encaustic. Move through, then open the full 14.
Vuelta a Quisqueya · primera obra anclaCiguapa*Ciguapa* is the first anchor work of *Vuelta a Quisqueya* · the piece that encodes the Caribbean body as myth. La Ciguapa is the female Antillean figure with inverted feet · her tracks confuse the pursuer. Folklore that will not be caught.
The dimensional cranium emerges from the cerulean field. One eye closed · one eye open. The double gaze looking inward and outward at the same time · diasporic body inhabiting two places without splitting. Filaments of gold emerge from the cranium · thought made matter. A clinical radiation thermoplastic mesh remains visible beneath the resin as armature of the face · flight carries structure, survival becomes form.
In the lower-left quadrant, beside the neck, two larimar cabochons from the Dominican Republic sit embedded in resin atop the clay impression of my daughter's footprints. Four presences concentrated in one zone of the linen · the geology of Quisqueya in two sizes (mother · mineral daughter), the body of the next generation, and my hand as mediator between the three times.
The work operates by centrifugal force · pushes the viewer outward, sends them searching. It is the piece that opens the cosmology. Conceptual pair to *Piedra de Bahoruco* · together they do not decorate the Caribbean, they argue it.
Larimar · memoria y herencia como sistemas vivosLas piedras de Bahoruco*Las piedras de Bahoruco* proposes identity as a landscape of inherited information. Each blue stone, inspired by larimar · the stone found only in the Dominican Republic · is a cell of memory, a story transmitted, a trait that remains.
From the center emerges a form that is island, coral, body, and vessel. It does not represent a place, but the living structure of inheritance: something formed under pressure, in silence, and revealed only with time.
*Las piedras de Bahoruco* honors the land that formed me and turns its geological rarity into a contemporary language of belonging.
Living Systems · Self-Portrait subserieEye Sea All I*Eye Sea All I* is faceless self-portrait. A 14-inch encaustic dome emerges from the linen as collective eye · "I see all · we all see." The body becomes optical device. The face is absent but the gaze multiplies · spheres as eyes scattered across the field, resin as eye moisture, gold at the edge as threshold between who looks and who is looked at.
The work carries the literal weight of the archive · resin layers poured over weeks, gold applied with bole and water, hand-stitched thread. Not illustration of the body · the body understood as distributed living system.
Living Systems · Self-Portrait subserie · KeystoneFaceless Self-Portrait*Faceless Self-Portrait* integrates a perforated thermoplastic mesh · clinical 2.4 mm gauge · reoriented as structural armature, not as testimony. The mesh bands remain visible beneath the resin, bonded to the linen and painted in cobalt and ultramarine to integrate them into the surface without erasing them.
The scar remains visible as a formal decision. This is not trauma on display · it is survival encoded into the material. The face is absent: the mesh describes the facial contour with greater precision than any image.
This is the keystone piece of *Living Systems* · the one that sustains the logic of the entire series.
Living Systems · Origin sub-seriesOrigin / Release IRelease: the loss of traits no longer selected for. Small resin spheres move across a pale field like traces, satellites, breaths, or memories. This is separation as continuity, not rupture.
Early major workBirds of a FeatherAn earlier voice in the cerulean language. The largest canvas in the inventory, painted before Living Systems formalized its vocabulary, but already speaking it. Dense chromatic biomorphic fields where every surface is occupied, the same maximalism that would later distill into restraint.
Living Systems · Genesis sub-seriesGenesisThe origin object. A small, dense field of hand-carved spheres bound by gold filament and sealed under resin, edged in twenty-four karat gold leaf. Held in studio as the first Living Systems work, by appointment only.
The full galleryAll 14 worksStatement
No pinto figuras. Excavo memoria.
Cosmología caribeña contemporánea · la materia como primer lenguaje.
La materia recuerda lo que el cuerpo no puede decir. Matter remembers what the body cannot say.
