Victoria Zeder

I work from a body that is archive, a matter that is language, and an abstraction that can be ancestral. Three convictions that sustain an entire studio practice · from the choice of support to the final resin layer.

My work proposes a contemporary Caribbean mythology. I do not illustrate the Caribbean · I embody it. Each piece is a question that refuses to disappear · a ciguapa fleeing without trace, a Bahoruco stone remembering what the subsoil kept, an island returning through the migrant body.

The practice unfolds in three movements. *Living Systems* (2024-2025, thirteen works on Belgian linen hand-primed with acrylic gesso in six to eight sanded layers) settles the formal vocabulary · epoxy resin poured in successive layers as contained water, spheres hand-turned in wood or cast in resin as cell, 23.75k gold leaf applied with bole and water as threshold, hand-stitched silk and cotton thread as lineage. The body is understood as a living system, not as figure.

*Self-Portraits* (2025-2026, ongoing) gains a subject · the face appears halfway, hidden by mesh veil or replaced by sphere. *Faceless Self-Portrait* integrates a perforated thermoplastic armature · clinical 2.4 mm gauge · bonded to the linen with resin and painted in cobalt and ultramarine. The scar remains visible as a formal decision. The face is absent: the mesh describes the facial contour with greater precision than any image.

*Vuelta a Quisqueya* (2026, in preparation) is the anchor work for CONTEXT Art Miami December 2026. The subject becomes myth. *La Ciguapa* inhabits the first piece · female Caribbean figure with inverted feet so her tracks confuse the pursuer · centrifugal force pushing the viewer outward. *Las piedras de Bahoruco* anchors an earlier memory · a 2024 work in polymer and 24k gold leaf on canvas · larimar, memory and inheritance as living systems.

The material vocabulary remains fixed and sourced from specific origins. Silk and cotton thread · hand-stitched with a curved needle onto primed linen · carry the tradition of Antillean female craft and the Dominican fishing net. Resin and epoxy are poured in successive layers · five to twelve passes depending on the optical depth required · each layer cures forty-eight hours before the next. Gold · 23.75k Mona Lisa leaf and mica paint · does not decorate. It marks where the body stops being body and starts being light. Spheres and discs are studio-fabricated · hand-turned in pine wood or cast in resin with iron oxide pigment · Taíno vocabulary dissolved into abstraction · cell, seed, eye, moon at once. Ambiguity is deliberate.

Contemporary Caribbean art knows abstraction as archive. My place in that tradition is distinct: I build the material surface · resin, gold, thread · as the archive itself. Not the body represented on the surface. The surface as body. I do not represent. I encode. The viewer does not look at the work. The work recognizes them.

I live and work in Miami.

Victoria Zeder (b. Santo Domingo, 1991) builds a contemporary Caribbean mythology through painting, sculpture and dimensional textile · matter as first language. Her practice is organized in three series · *Living Systems*, *Self-Portraits* (with *Faceless Self-Portrait* as keystone, structural thermoplastic armature integrated into a surface painted in cobalt and ultramarine on Belgian linen) and *Vuelta a Quisqueya* (in preparation · anchor work for CONTEXT Art Miami 2026). Lives and works in Miami, bilingual ES/EN. Presents *Living Systems* at Hamptons Fine Art Fair 2026, Booth 413 · *Vuelta a Quisqueya* at CONTEXT Art Miami December 2026.