Main Projects presents The Body as Weather, a two-person exhibition of new work by Shuling Guo and Zuriel Waters. The exhibition approaches the body not as fixed anatomy but as a shifting system, responsive and intuitive. Across both practices, the body behaves like climate - cyclical, accumulative, and shaped by pressures that gather and disperse over time.
Shuling Guo’s paintings emerge from lived experience rather than anatomical study. Working on linen stretched over wood panel, she builds each surface through layered oil and finishes it with colored pencil, producing a matte, earthbound skin that absorbs light even as a quiet luminosity pulses from within. Illumination does not fall from a single source. It circulates, as though generated by the form itself.
In Guo’s paintings, anatomy and nature are not separate categories but interchangeable forms. In Pelvis II, the form of a pelvis echoes the wings of a butterfly. The opening and closing of wings recalls the physical memory of childbirth. The pelvis becomes a site of origin. The butterfly, long associated in literature and mythology with the soul and its arrival and departure, becomes a figure of release. The body is both chamber and threshold. In Portrait IV and Portrait V, vertical forms read simultaneously as flower and figure, their proportions quietly evoking the female body.
Motherhood marks a decisive shift in Guo’s practice. The birth of her daughter, the death of her grandmother, and an acute awareness of time have sharpened both urgency and confidence. Greens, purples, and deep reds emerge from close observation of dried flowers in her studio. She describes their gradual transformation as fermentation, a slow, organic process that mirrors the lifecycle of the body. Time, in these paintings, is material.
Architectural arches frame many of the works. Informed by her upbringing in southern China, where temples were the most ornate and attentively maintained spaces, the arch functions as both structural device and gesture of reverence. It shelters the form and offers it a home. Across Eastern and Western references, Guo treats feminine presence not as symbol but as something sustained and honored.
Zuriel Waters describes his paintings as records of movement, gestural and bodily, loosely descriptive of cubist human anatomy. Though abstract, they often suggest emotional posture: a shoulder tilting, a limb slackening, a form gathering inward. Installed directly on the wall without rigid armature, the works appear buoyant, as though suspended in air or water, with gravity implied rather than enforced.
Each painting begins with drawing. Shapes are cut, assembled, and sewn before being stained with custom pigment dispersions made from dry pigment and acrylic medium so that color embeds into the surface rather than sitting atop it. Straight lines emerge only where the material folds. Folding becomes both structural solution and conceptual language.
In August (2025), the form suggests a drooping arm, a shoulder, possibly even two heads. The painting reads as wistful and contemplative, an emotional pose rendered in its most reduced form. Waters does not plan figuration. It surfaces intuitively. He describes his process as “language without language,” a meditative system in which sculpture produces painting and each work flows into the next.
Referencing Le Corbusier’s notion of buildings as “machines for living,” Waters thinks of his practice as a kind of art process machine that responds to bodily movement, space, and use. Constraint becomes generative. Structure anticipates the body.
Together, Guo and Waters treat painting as a site of transformation rather than definition. Their works resist fixed narratives, unfolding through sensation and intuition. In The Body as Weather, the body is not a stable image but a system in flux — storing memory, registering pressure, and reshaped over time.