a pain that is not private
May 1st - June 21st, 2025
Opening Reception: First Thursday, May 1, 5-8pm
Second Reception: First Thursday, June 5, 5-8pm
Gallery Hours: By Appointment on Saturdays, 12-3pm
Specialist presents a pain that is not private a group show with works by
Monyee Chau
Andy Delapp
Bailee Hiatt
Inji Kim & Rosaline Dou
Sadaf Sadrii
María Zamora
In order to be addressed, pain must be legible. While we are in pain—and when we are trying to rid ourselves of it—we’re often expected to explain what hurts, to narrate it cleanly, to shape it into something understandable. But pain doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it arrives as static, as tightness, or as a fog you can’t quite describe. The artists in this show don’t meet that pressure with clarity. Instead, they make room for hesitation, privacy, and the right to remain partly untranslatable. Privacy here isn’t about retreat—it’s about deciding how and when to speak. Visibility isn’t fixed either, but a condition negotiated across roles, spaces, and expectations.
Lara Mimosa Montes’s A Pain That Is Not Private doesn’t begin with a wound, but with a shift in focus: away from the object, toward the light that bounces off it. That light—scattered, indirect, sometimes blinding—shapes how we register pain. Not as a clean event, but as something peripheral, suspended, or hard to name. The works in this exhibition hold close to that complexity. They don’t offer resolution, but they remain with what is unresolved.
There is a time and place in the world for abstraction. When my mother left Puerto Rico for the first time, the year was 1968. Against my unknowing. We hesitate to say what intimacy is and whether or not we have it. I keep trying / to teach my students that / stream-of-consciousness is / this, not that / this / activity fails. We know it does because each of us leaves the room / feeling like barbed wire— snarling behind the barricade (because) at some point, we stopped feeling (like language could say). So we went without while some others embraced. Notice (after the emptiness) : a pain that is not private. In other words, focus not on the object, but rather, the light that bounces off of that object. Perforated. Estranged. Esa luz. Tómatela. Under that light° I felt my body try / to hold on (to the knot inside) your right hand; when did it become a fist? Remind me what it is again / what it is that you wish / to share (with others) >> when you’re on stage…
°That light, this pain (what never translates).
Lara Mimosa Montes’s Poem A Pain That Is Not Private, 2018
The familiar framework of fight or flight fails to account for much of what it takes to continue making in the present. What sits between urgency and retreat—what often gets overlooked—is the effort to stay, to care, to create. The artists in this show work deliberately, with presence and with force, insisting on the value of art not only as personal expression, but as public practice. Their work affirms that making—like teaching, witnessing, reflecting—is a form of labor that shapes culture and insists on its future. These are not gestures of retreat or avoidance; they are acts of assertion, of continuity, and of vision.
a pain that is not private is not about confession or exposure. It’s about the uneven, ongoing process of holding space—for oneself, for others, and for what doesn’t easily translate. The artists in this show move through the weight of daily life, structural pressure, and historical repetition—and still, they make. They teach, create, gather, and advocate for the possibilities art offers. Their presence is not only resistant—it is formative. The aim of this exhibition is to argue that these works are beyond visible; they make our worlds vital.
Press Release Written by Inji Kim
Show title sourced from Monte’s Poem