Mana Contemporary
5/20/2025
Nicholas D’Ornellas
“A Last Look”
Twenty-four mediated screenprints of a once-beloved place
When you’ve got your stuff in a storage unit and no place to forward your mail, the indeterminacy and in-between-ness of life plays funny tricks on your identity.
For the luckier ones among us, that sensation only lasts a short time before they move in to a new home. In “A Last Look,” the Guyanese-born D’Ornellas makes a subtle case that for immigrants, that weightlessness never entirely fades — even when they’re in the same flat for years.
Through symbol, color, texture and allusion, a portrait of a family emerges in “A Last Look.” Though we never see them, we know who these people are. They’re as American as anybody in this hemisphere, but their position in the United States isn’t as secure as they’d like it to be.