Halsey McKay Gallery and Marinaro are pleased to present What Stays With Me, Cait Porter’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The works in the show center on intimate still lifes drawn from the artist’s apartment, bringing together personal mementos, everyday objects, and quiet traces of loss. These paintings function as sites where memory and the present coexist — records of lingering grief embedded within the routines of daily life.
Porter’s subjects include photographs of loved ones who have passed, inherited keepsakes, handmade objects from friends, and reminders of places that feel both distant and formative. A refrigerator becomes a shifting still-life surface where memento mori sit beside utility bills and souvenir magnets; a tea box gifted in childhood rests among medications and a tea kettle; flowers and a handmade bolo tie recall a friend’s memorial while echoing art-historical traditions of still-life painting. Throughout the works, objects carry layered meanings of comfort and sadness, continuity and rupture, without resolving into narrative closure.
In several paintings, Porter introduces reflection and return. A compact mirror reflecting her own hand among letters and notebooks, or a photograph taken by her grandmother in Venice, re-situated on a bedspread alongside the presence of her cat. These gestures bind past and present, allowing memory to surface through touch, placement, and proximity. What Stays with Me is a meditation on how grief persists quietly—how we hold onto objects, arrange them, live among them, and continue forward. Porter’s paintings offer a tender, unsentimental reflection on remembrance, survival, and the fragile intimacy of everyday life.
Cait Porter (b. 1985, Austin, TX) lives and works in Queens, NY. She received her MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BA in art from Vassar College. Porter’s work has been included in exhibitions at JDJ, New York, NY; Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, CA; International Objects, Brooklyn, NY; Marinaro, New York, NY; Mrs., Queens, NY; Stella Elkins Gallery at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, and numerous other venues. Porter is a 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the CATWALK Art Residency, and the David Wurtzel Residency in Italy.