Rooms We Carry
Frankie L.Abroon, Nick Pont & Emma Regner
Essay by Joey Hespe
Memory rarely unfolds in a straight line. It surfaces instead in fragments: an image half remembered, a sensation lodged somewhere between the body and the mind. A scene glimpsed through dim light, the echo of a gesture, the stain of colour that lingers long after the moment has passed. What we call memory is less an archive than a shifting landscape, sedimented with experience, unstable beneath the surface, and continually rewritten by time. The past does not sit quietly behind us. It seeps forward and reshapes the present each time it returns.
Rooms We Carry brings together three artists whose practices examine the shifting conditions of inner life. Across abstraction, figuration, and mnemonic imagination Nick Pont, Frankie L. Abroon, and Emma Regner approach the self as something in flux, formed through sensation, environment, and lived experience.
In the work of Nick Pont, the interior expands outward and dissolves into landscape and atmosphere. Pont’s sustained engagement with natural phenomena such as light, tide, and atmospheric fluctuation becomes both method and material. His practice enacts a dialogue between environment, perception, and embodied experience. Working with pigments and inks that diffuse through wet paper, Pont allows colour to spread, bloom, and settle according to the unpredictable logic of fluid and fibre. Rather than constructing images through representation, the works allow forms to emerge through process.
Across these surfaces we encounter halos of colour, cellular blooms, tidal stains, and radiant centres that resemble suns, spores, or microscopic organisms. At times the works evoke aerial landscapes. At others they suggest cosmic fields or biological structures seen through magnification. Scale becomes uncertain. The viewer oscillates between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Within this ambiguity, recognisable forms begin to appear. A horizon line. A drifting column that resembles smoke or mist. Branching structures that might suggest trees, rivers, or nervous systems. These images remain unstable and hover at the threshold of recognition. Even as we begin to identify them, they dissolve back into abstraction.
Emma Regner situates the interior within the body itself. Working with oil stick in raw, gestural compositions, her figures emerge as visceral expressions of lived experience. Bodies fold, crouch, and contort across the surface, their forms rendered with an immediacy that feels both vulnerable and confrontational. Regner draws from deeply personal experiences of trauma, desire, and vulnerability. She translates complex emotional states into imagery that resists narrative resolution.
Her figures often appear caught in moments of psychic exposure. Limbs bend at improbable angles, hair spills across the body in dense black marks, and faces emerge only partially, with hollowed eyes and mouths marked by sudden flashes of red. These are not stable bodies but fragile ones. They bear the traces of memory as something inscribed within the flesh. In Regner’s work, the interior is not hidden within the mind but carried physically and revealed through gesture, posture, and mark.
Frankie L. Abroon approaches interiority through acts of careful construction. At first glance, her work appears as an elaborate field of ornament. The surface is scorched and textured, and its decorative patterning recalls baroque wallpaper, architectural ironwork, or the intricate repetitions of historical textiles. The eye is drawn first to the rhythm of the surface and to the ornamental structure that frames and contains the composition. Yet as the viewer lingers, another image begins to surface beneath the decorative skin.
A figure appears. A domestic interior. A table, a reclining body, a floor lamp spilling light. The scene emerges slowly, fractured and partially obscured, as though glimpsed through smoke or the damaged emulsion of an old photograph. The image does not present itself immediately. It must be discovered. In this way the work behaves much like memory itself, emerging gradually through layers of distortion.
The sepia tonality reinforces this sense of temporal displacement. Historically associated with early photographic processes, sepia carries the aura of the archival image. The past appears fixed in fragile chemical form. Yet here the image refuses stability. It appears to have been burned into the surface and ruptures through the ornamental field that both conceals and contains it. The elaborate border becomes less a frame than a membrane through which fragments of lived experience slowly return.
Across these practices, the artists stage the moment at which matter becomes image. In Abroon’s work, the image breaks through the ornamental surface like a buried narrative resurfacing through time. In Pont’s paintings, images condense gradually from the organic movement of pigment and emerge from the behaviour of the medium itself. In Regner’s figures, the body becomes the site through which memory and emotion erupt into visibility.
What connects these works is a shared attention to interiority, not merely the interior of rooms but the interior landscapes we all carry within us. Throughout life we move through countless environments. Houses, streets, offices, landscapes. Yet these places do not disappear when we leave them. They remain stored within us, sedimented as impressions that accompany us across time. The places we inhabit become internal geographies that quietly shape the way we perceive the world. In this sense, memory is spatial. It is architectural.
The works in Rooms We Carry ask where such images reside. Are they contained within the mind alone, or do they linger within the materials and environments that once held them? Abroon’s surfaces suggest that memory can be embedded within architecture itself and hidden beneath layers of decoration and time. Pont’s paintings imply that memory may behave more like a natural process, something that grows, disperses, and reforms like pigment moving through water. Regner’s work reminds us that memory is also carried within the body and inscribed through experience and emotion.
Together, the artists propose a quiet but profound idea. The rooms we carry within us are not fixed locations but shifting constellations of sensation, image, and atmosphere. Memory, after all, is not simply a record of where we have been. It is the landscape we continue to inhabit.
– Joey Hespe