In The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher writes, “The person you love is 72.8% water,” a sobering perspective that equalizes humanity. As this statement posits, water is everywhere, and is as much a part of the person you sleep next to, as it is of oceans and your afternoon tea. It is around us enough that it’s easy to dismiss or forget about. But where do we put it? a group show by Kristine Caguiat, Paulina Ortega, and Carina Santos, explores the many ways that water affects us: as both a physical, foundational part, and as something that, quite literally, surrounds us.

In Ortega’s graphite and watercolor pieces, she expounds on Fletcher’s observation and looks into the tidal phenomena that occur within people. She attempts to chart the ebb and flow of these inner waters and their consequential influence on the mind and body.

How do our waters shift along with the moon’s gravitational pull? Does the water in our bodies ebb and flow or get pulled along the currents of our emotions? What would these movements look like, uncontained? Ortega attempts to answer these questions by pairing hyper-realistic graphite drawings of the human body, consumed and obscured by water-like abstractions that are meant to describe these phenomena.

In attempting satire, Caguiat delves into water’s properties of self-containment and polarity by providing a glimpse of a singular moment in time. These snippets are seemingly wrought with emotion, but only at first glance. In "Temptation on Weekend," an acrylic painting of a comic panel, there is obvious tension (or passion), but only on the surface. Further inspection provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary into a private dialogue; a vacuous exchange that is both frivolous and shallow.

The scope of Santos’ exploration goes beyond containment within the human body, hinging her work on the notion of water as both distance—in the form of literal oceans that span the space between continents—and as the actual matter that connects us to each other and tethers us to everything else. Water, in all the forms it takes, is still matter, and all matter is barrier. This thought presents a dichotomy of water as a free-flowing substance that takes the shape of what contains it, and water as something that physically separates—from a molecular level to something much larger than our bodies—a barrier that keeps things apart.