Stanek Gallery Miami is proud to present Between Walls and Worlds, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of SAMDI and Treacy Ziegler, two parallel practices that navigate absence, adaptation, and the emotional space between visibility and loss. Through painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, the exhibition explores how inner landscapes take form when the external world is unstable, absent, or restricted, shaping a visual conversation around the question: When place is denied, what takes root instead?
SAMDI, a Haitian-born artist currently based in Miami, works with densely layered textures, gestural abstraction, and recurring symbols (fish, birds, fragmented bodies) that evoke both rupture and continuity. His mixed-media paintings often blur the boundaries between figure and environment, reflecting not only the experience of displacement but also resilience and reimagining. Rather than offering a fixed interpretation of his cultural roots, SAMDI allows memory, history, and invention to surface through mark-making, color, and form. His compositions feel at once grounded and untethered as complex, intuitive acts of connectedness across the face of distance.
Ziegler, working from rural upstate New York, approaches solitude not as separation but as a space for attunement. Her prints and paintings convey quiet intensity: taxidermied animals, vacant chairs, and muted landscapes rendered in deliberate, patient strokes. Her sculptural works, developed through long-term correspondence with incarcerated individuals, emerge from a relational process rooted in mutual exchange rather than representation. These pieces, made from cast paper utilizing hundreds of handwritten letters, reflect shared acts of expression forged within constraint. Ziegler’s practice holds space for ambiguity, empathy, and recognition without resolution.
Across both artists’ work, the recurring visual motifs of vacant chairs, layered silhouettes and animal forms, serve as anchors throughout the exhibition. These images are not symbolic puzzles to solve, but open forms that echo across media and space, creating a quiet but persistent rhythm of gesture, memory, remaining, connecting, and inhabiting the in-between.
Between Walls and Worlds is not simply a reflection on exile or solitude, but an invitation to consider how creative practice can locate something vital in the absence of place, and how art becomes a form of presence, not escape.
Maryam Davani Hosseini, who came on board as Stanek Gallery’s Gallery Administrator earlier this year, curated this exhibition with great intention. Hosseini reflects, “I didn’t set out to pair these two artists, but when I sat with their work, it was clear that they’re both creating from spaces of distance. Not just physical distance, but the kind shaped by systems that separate people from land, from home, from each other. Their work carries the weight of that, but also the refusal to be disconnected. That tension between absence and insistence is what this show is holding.”
