Presented by Make Room, The Yearlings by Kira Maria Shewfelt is a solo exhibition devoted to moments of becoming. In each painting, figures of lovers and children, horses and butterflies alike, convene, sharing touch or experience in scenes the artist describes as moments of “high transference and action”— and so, touch is a relational reminder, a promise that we are bound together, interconnected through our relationships, with potential for becoming more. Kira Maria’s paintings dispense with artifice and caring too much about the wrong things. Intimacy is a holding, an embrace, a kiss, a touch, but it is also the incremental appearance and shedding of expectations— there is permission to be observed as we really are and to want for more. Intimacy, care, and affection verge close to the goals of art, a meditation on what intuitively moves us. Intimacy is truthful— it is the personal made sublime, an ode to transformative experiences. -Candice C. Chu Artist, writer, and contributing art editor