A gift is never neutral. Each offering establishes its own economy—of debt, recognition, and belonging—binding people in ways that outlast the moment. Gifts carry memory and affection, but also weave us into networks of obligation, hierarchy, and refusal. To give or to receive is to enter into relation, marked by power, desire, and expectation.

 

The works in Gift hold this tension close. Elizabeth Bergeland paints a goldfish offered as a present in Waiting for the Goldfish to Die—an image of tenderness that doubles as a lifelong burden. In Searching for Pearls, Marisa Regante braids the erotic and the symbolic, linking oysters, pearls, and sex in a meditation on intimacy and exchange. Alexandra Rubinstein reimagines the rose in her own menstrual blood—at once familiar and insistently personal, transforming a cliché of romance into something raw, corporeal, and inescapably subjective. In Wrapped, Jordan Sears presents a cropped torso bound like a package, collapsing flesh and commodity into a single uneasy form.

 

Tariq Oliver turns to embodiment and play: in Womb of Many Selves, the pregnant figure becomes a vessel of life, identity, and transformation: three heads facing past, present, and future bear witness to the many selves carried through time. The piece resonates as an offering of creation itself, a gift of perspective and continuity. By contrast, Tender Surprise captures a fleeting moment of joy—an adult cradling a Labubu teddy, the mischievous toy conjuring the imagination of childhood. Here, the gift is less monumental yet no less profound: a reminder that tenderness, innocence, and play are treasures to be held onto even in adulthood.

 

Rebecca Storm turns to allegory. In Alliance, ants and peonies enter into symbiosis: the insects feast and the flower blooms—mutual nourishment, but also mutual dependency. In Trade, she returns to the egg: fragile, suspended, a charged offering that demands response. Incubate, consume, break open, neglect—each choice becomes part of the exchange, a reckoning with possibility and loss.

 

Gift does not resolve into a single statement; it unfolds as a shifting relation. Each work reminds us that to give is also to demand, to receive is also to incur, and that every exchange leaves a trace. What lingers is not certainty but movement: a circulation of objects, bodies, and meanings that resists closure, alive in the tension between generosity and debt, pleasure and burden.