Curator: Tia Xu 

Exhibition Date: April 26th – May 31st, 2025

Opening Reception: 2–5 PM, April 26th, 2025

Address: The Scholart Selection, 417 South Mission Drive, San Gabriel, CA 91776 

The Scholart Selection is pleased to present My Room Is Not My Room, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Kim Marra, on view from April 26 to May 31, 2025. Curated by New York–based curator Tia Xu, the exhibition features over twenty recent oil paintings. 

Kim Marra reconstructs familiar domestic spaces through her signature geometric compositions and saturated color fields. Drawing from daily items, such as curtains, pillows, plants, bed linens, she uses techniques of collage, displacement, and reassembly to strip these objects of their original context, generating a visual language that feels at once intimate and estranged. 

Her work often raises a thought-provoking question: when a space becomes layered with personal memory, cultural background, and sensory experience, does it still belong to a single person? Or does it transform into a psychological container—one that is continually projected upon, reinterpreted, and reshaped by multiple identities? Rather than recreating specific lived environments, Kim constructs ambiguous, floating, and stage-like visual structures that challenge conventional notions of home and belonging. 

In Gold Velvet (2025), for instance, a vibrant ochre velvet curtain divides the canvas like a theatrical drape, partially obscuring a pair of retro-patterned pillows behind it. Lush plants peek in from both sides, as if quietly observing an interrupted stage set. The scene is tranquil yet suspenseful, placing the viewer on the edge of a recently vacated space—hovering between familiarity and intrusion. In Interior Design (2024), Kim further destabilizes the logic of space and symbols, turning once-familiar domestic elements into visual signifiers meant to be looked at rather than used. The work exudes a suspended sense of ritual, like a psychological play about the idea of the room itself—mirroring the exhibition’s exploration of spatial belonging and perceptual experience. 

In Kim Marra’s practice, the "room" is no longer a symbol of emotional safety or belonging, but a fluid constellation of shifting spatial relationships. Familiar objects cease to be passive; instead, they seem to possess a will of their own, subtly altering the dynamic between viewer and image. This familiarity lies at the heart of the artist’s response to contemporary questions of identity, migration, and visual culture. 

Kim Marra invites viewers to approach each fragmented detail with a mix of hesitation and curiosity—because within these seemingly trivial elements, traces of cultural background, psychological position, and sensory perception quietly emerge.