In Between Memory + Matter, curated by nico w. okoro, Aliyah Lacombe and Marquis Brantley Sr. transform everyday and inherited materials into vessels for memory, identity, and survival. Working in different registers — Lacombe across the longue durée of diaspora, Brantley within the intimate geography of family and city — the two artists share a conviction that material remembers. Driftwood shaped by water, corduroy softened by wear, plastics discarded and reclaimed: nothing in this exhibition arrives blank. Each artist takes up what the world has cast off or passed down and asks it to speak.
Aliyah Lacombe is a Haitian American artist working at the intersection of nature, culture, and human experience. Across painting, woodcarving, sculpture, and installation, she uses clay, shells, wood, and found objects that carry histories of use and transformation. Drawing on Haitian and West African folklore, she blends traditional and contemporary techniques to honor ancestral knowledge fragmented by colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. Repurposing found objects, she says, mirrors "the diasporic experience itself — the adapting, enduring, and integrating, while holding onto cultural memory."
In Sound the Drum, creation becomes invocation: held within a driftwood frame, the piece imagines "sound before it's heard," its figures illustrating the energy a drum maker envisions while stretching leather. That reverence for the natural world recurs in She Who Listens to the Trees, where a woman and a bird meet in mutual recognition, and in My Shield Through Muddy Waters, where a crocodile emerging from patchwork water becomes a totem of resilience — its tough skin the armor inherited from those who came before. In …and the Natural, an ancestral guide moves between spirit and earth: blackness a spiritual portal, driftwood the living earth. Throughout, Lacombe reclaims subjects, symbols, and materials demonized through colonization, reconstructing the stories that surround them.
Where Lacombe reaches across oceans and centuries, Marquis Brantley Sr. — an artist and writer from New Haven, CT — works close to home. For this exhibition, he pairs figurative and abstract paintings with original soliloquies drawn from his upbringing and community. Working from found and family photographs, interviews, and everyday life, he centers Black boys and men in their full complexity — through color, material, pose, style, and gaze. His latest series turns to intertwined human and climate catastrophes, transforming recycled plastics and household, industrial, and natural materials into topographical imagery.
Caused Chaos layers recycled plastics, asphalt, nails, and spray paint into a small, dense surface, pressing environmental and social reckoning into a single frame. Covered in Dirt expands that material language across a larger canvas, adding acrylic and glitter — a surface holding grit and shine at once. Two works turn toward family: Call Me by My Name (Mar-Kees), painted on found corduroy and canvas, and Marquis Tyron Brantley Jr. (My First Born), a large acrylic portrait. Exalted Rage, the earliest work in the exhibition, renders its subject at scale entirely in acrylic. Whatever language he turns to, Brantley intends for audiences to leave with "a strong sense of joy, empathy, and caution."
The exhibition's title names the ground both artists share. For Lacombe, matter is never neutral — it arrives carrying histories of use and survival, and she reshapes it into vessels for what colonization and displacement have tried to erase. For Brantley, paint, glitter, and melted plastics become the physical language through which memory — personal, familial, communal, and environmental — is made visible. In both practices, material is not simply a medium but a site of memory itself: something worked, reworked, and made to hold what words alone cannot.
— nico w. okoro, Curator-at-Large, Orchid Gallery