Parallax, A Trace, 2025

In Withheld, a letter on Awagami paper sits sealed inside acrylic glass, with a resin form leaning at the base of the wall below it. The contents of the letter are hidden, and only its shadow can be seen up close.

Parallax is the shift an object appears to make when it is seen from two positions. Since the nineteenth century, astronomers have used it to measure the distance to a star, observing it against other stars six months apart as the Earth moves along its orbit. In Parallax, A Trace, Oriente applies the same idea to memory, which returns to a person from a distance and never quite in the same place.

The gallery is kept dark, and light enters it slowly and in parts. Three backlit prints are blurred so that what they show changes as a visitor moves along the wall. A photocopy is divided across three layers of tracing paper, so the image never sits on a single plane. A four-minute video moves through saffron pollen, concrete steps and light coming in through a gap.

By the entrance, a small stand holds Iterations. Oriente wrote a poem and ran it through a Markov chain, which rearranges words by probability. The results were printed on translucent paper, with one signed original among them, and visitors were invited to take a sheet.