Stuck in the Middle

In her most recent body of work, Mexican artist Pia Camil incorporates wooden blinds that function as windows embedded within the pictorial surface. Conceived as landscapes, the paintings evoke the experience of looking outward from a domestic interior; yet this direction of the gaze can be reversed, suggesting an inward-looking perspective as well. This ambiguity transforms the window into a metaphor for the ways in which subjectivity may be understood as a reflection of the landscape—or even as a landscape in its own right. Drawing from her recent personal experience—marked by the decision to reshape her life toward a more radical, communal existence in a rural setting—Camil articulates, through these works, the tensions and contradictions between the natural world and domestic life, between inside and outside. The lattice screens do not operate solely as formal devices, but as liminal elements that destabilize the traditional boundaries of painting: what academic aesthetics would have regarded as frame or support is here integrated into the work as an active agent of meaning. Within this intermediate space, the artist challenges the notion of the artwork’s closed autonomy and instead proposes an aesthetic that emerges from the everyday, where the domestic, the functional, and the sensorial intertwine. Painting thus ceases to function as a transparent window onto the external world and becomes, instead, a threshold—a site of passage in which landscape, interiority, and lived experience are mutually reflected. BL. Pia Camil (b. 1980) lives and works between Acatitlán, Edo. de México and Mexico City. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2008). Camil has held major solo exhibitions at international institutions, including Fuego Amigo at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2024); Three Works at MOCA Tucson (2020); Here Comes The Sun, a performance at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); Fade into Black: Sit, chill, look, talk, roll, play, listen, give, take, dance, share at the Queens Museum, New York (2019); Bara, Bara, Bara, Tramway Art Space, Glasgow (2019); Telón de Boca at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (2018); Split Wall at Nottingham Contemporary (2018); and A Pot for a Latch at the New Museum, New York (2016). Camil's work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), Berkeley, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, NY; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France; Kadist Collection, Paris, France; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI.

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