Baker—Hall and Mahara+Co are pleased to present Holding Form, a collaborative group exhibition opening Saturday, February 28, from 5—8pm. The exhibition brings together artists from both gallery programs and marks the beginning of a new chapter as the two galleries share a single space while maintaining distinct curatorial voices.
Holding Form convenes six artists whose practices consider how form is constructed, contained, activated, and sustained. Across painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the works move between formal restraint and embodied expression, examining how structure and experience shape one another.
Rather than positioning these approaches in contrast, the exhibition proposes a productive dialogue. Some works emerge from systems, repetition, and material discipline; others unfold through gesture, narrative, and lived presence. Together, they create a space where form becomes both boundary and threshold.
The practices of Mahara+Co artists Lucas Estévez, Elvira Smeke, and Sebastián Baudrand are grounded in formal systems and material inquiry. Through repetition, accumulation, and measured gesture, their works emphasize process and duration. Form becomes a method of thinking — an architecture shaped by erosion, restraint, and close attention.
In dialogue, Baker—Hall artists Jen Clay, Debbi Kenote, and Melissa Wallen approach form through memory, and personal mythology. Clay’s immersive, psychological language challenges perception and invites interior reflection. Kenote’s materially attuned works use repetition and mark-making as quiet acts of insistence. Wallen’s layered compositions suspend image and gesture, allowing color and structure to carry emotional weight. Across their practices, form remains fluid — shaped by lived experience and intuition rather than fixed systems.
Holding Form ultimately considers form as an evolving condition — an unstable balance between structure and subjectivity, material logic and emotional charge.
Sebastián Baudrand
Multidisciplinary artist who has focused his research on the relationship between art and context, reflecting on the paradigms of current society and territorie problems. Sebastián Baudrand is a nomadic artist, a condition that we can recognize both by his constant movement between localities and in his work, which he creates without sticking to any particular discipline, focused on the production of objects, images, devices and immersive installations that derive from long research processes of the context in which they are conceived. He studied Architecture and Visual Arts in Santiago (UFT), continuing with sculpture and engraving in Mexico. Between 2009 and 2022 he lives and works in a rural area near Puerto Varas (southern Chile), where he develops various collective and individual investigative and exhibition projects. He has exhibited in Chile, Mexico, the United States, France, Portugal and Peru. In 2018 he exhibited individually at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile with the project “Translucent Polymers”. His work is part of private and public collections. He has carried out artistic residencies in Chile and abroad, highlighting his participation in SAPS – La Tallera, México 2017, Residencia De al Lado, Lima, Peru 2021-2023 and NO ENTULHO ArtWorks Residency, Portugal 2022. In 2026 he will participate in the High House Working Residency in Norfolk, England. He lived the last two years in Mexico participating in several group and also individual exhibitions at the Guadalajara90210 Gallery (GDL 2024) and at El Caustro de Sor Juana (CDMX 2024). He currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Jen Clay
Born in 1985 in Mountain View, NC, Jen Clay earned a BFA from UNC Charlotte and an MFA from the University of Florida in 2014 with a minor in costume design and applied behavioral analysis. Now based in South Florida, Clay creates sensory-inclusive textile works and installations created to be inclusive to neurodivergent, visually impaired, and anxiety-sensitive audiences. Jen Clay’s early interactive works were presented at Girls Club Collection, the Norton Museum of Art, MOCA North Miami, and Miami Light Box, including Welcome to You&Me (2019), an installation created for neurodiverse children.
Clay has completed residencies at Oolite Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. A short documentary about their work, The Texture of Anxiety, received a regional Emmy for its exploration of mental health through tactile art. In 2023, Clay received a Knight Arts New Work Award for a quilt-based video game and installation at Locust Projects that blended handmade textures with interactive storytelling. Their permanent public artwork, commissioned through Miami-Dade Art in Public Places, was installed at Brisas del Este Apartments in 2022.
Clay’s first solo exhibition at Emerson Dorsch, This World Doesn’t Belong to You (2023), featured quilted works with sewn messages created during the pandemic to address collective and personal anxiety, and visitors were allowed to discover the sewn messages. Their interactive quilt Soft Night Watching is currently on view at the Ackland Art Museum through June 2026, inviting visitors to discover hidden messages through touch.
Most recently, Clay was an artist-in-residence at the McColl Center (January–April 2025) tocreate a soft-theature-like set that was shown at the Girls’Club Collection with programming that included a talk with Annie Hoffman called “Strange Days: Sensory Worlds and Mental Weather” explores mental health, sensory experiences, and the eerie threads that shape Jen’s work. This talk invites you to sit with uncertainty and reflect on what it means to be human in a world that often feels overwhelming and mysterious.. Across their practice, Clay uses textiles, softness, and storytelling to create accessible environments that offer comfort, imagination, and emotional connection. They live and work in South Florida and is represented by Baker-Hall gallery.
Lucas Estévez
Lucas Estévez’s creative process uses the template and stencil, which through painting result in definitions that seek similarity with digital and vector. In this way, Estévez seeks to provoke a tension between the machine and the human being, the organic and the geometric, questioning the reality of the virtual.
Bachelor of art with a mention in painting from Finis Terrae University. His work has been exhibited collectively at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (2017), Galería Factoría Santa Rosa (2017), Museo de Artes Visuales (2018), Galería Patricia Ready (2018), among others. Recently he has participated in the Molten Capital Residence and in Panal 361. His work is part of the collection of the Museum of Visual Arts, acquired in the context of ArtStgo.
Debbi Kenote
Debbi Kenote (b. 1991, Anacortes, WA) has exhibited at galleries internationally, including shows at Cristin Tierney Gallery, My Pet Ram, Kate Werble, and Marvin Gardens in New York; Duran|Mashaal Gallery in Montreal; Cob Gallery in London; and Fir Gallery in Beijing. She received her BFA in Painting from Western Washington University and her MFA in Sculpture from Brooklyn College. Kenote has been published through The Art Newspaper, Art Fuse, Maake Magazine, Suboart, Art of Choice, Two Coats of Paint, and Hyperallergic.
Her work has been placed in several collections, including the OZ Art Collection and the Capital One Corporate Collection. She has been an artist in residence at Stove Works, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Saltonstall Foundation, PLOP, Nes Artist Residency, DNA, and the Mineral School. In 2022 she was a finalist for the Innovate Grant and in 2021 she was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize. Kenote has a studio in Brooklyn, NY. In 2024 she joined on as a curator at the NYC based gallery Below Grand.
Elvira Smeke
The work of Elvira Smeke (Mexico, 1978) stems from a reflection on the condition of women in the contemporary world. By critically reclaiming patterns imposed on women through patriarchal structures, her strategies of “resistance” are activated precisely through bodily pleasure. For this reason, her materials consist of domestic elements linked to labor and the supposed role of “compliance.”
Elvira Smeke’s work is, in some ways, deeply performative: she undertakes long walks during which she collects discarded objects. During these outings, Smeke creates interactions between the objet trouvé and her own body. All of these processes construct highly complex autobiographical narratives, which unfold through the accidents that occur during their activation.
In recent years, her practice has focused on her family roots and everyday life, which therefore form the foundation of her work. Although her production may appear formal in nature, it is in fact anchored in personal traces, marks, and memories.
Melissa Wallen
Melissa Wallen’s paintings open onto spaces where color collides and disperses, placing viewers at the edge of what can be seen and sensed. Her canvases remain unsettled: gestures layered, surfaces shifting, forms never fixed. Their register extends outward, evoking celestial markers, natural phenomena, and states of desire and procession.
Wallen is an American painter (b. 1987) in Voorhees, New Jersey, who lives and works in Miami, Florida. Wallen received a BFA in Painting and Fibers from Florida International University (2010). Her practice spans painting, collage, video, and curatorial work and is grounded in creating spaces where experimentation, embodiment, and community converge. Wallen is drawn to that which exists at thresholds—between material and immaterial, analog and digital, public and personal.
Selected solo exhibitions include “you are not an island” (2025, Miami Design District, Miami, Florida), “between sleep and sky” (2024, Baker—Hall Gallery, Miami, Florida), and “worlds behind you” (2023, Laundromat Art Space, Miami, Florida).
Selected group exhibitions include “Windows” (2025, Baker—Hall Gallery, Miami, Florida), “House in Motion” (2024, de la Cruz Collection, Miami, Florida), and “The BluPrnt” (2022, Bridge Red Studios, Miami, Florida).
Wallen is currently the Director of Exhibitions at Oolite Arts. Past professional experience includes Director of Art and Cultural Engagement, Key Biscayne Community Foundation, and Director, de la Cruz Collection, Miami. In 2022, she was recognized as a Knight Arts Champion by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for her ongoing contributions and leadership within Miami’s art community.
Baker—Hall is a contemporary art gallery founded by Amanda Baker—Hall in 2024. It is the successor to her previous project, Club Gallery. The gallery aims to promote emerging and mid-career artists through a fresh curatorial approach, while also offering comprehensive art advisory services. Baker—Hall specializes in painting and sculpture across narrative and non-objective styles, with a focus on collaborating with private collectors and prominent corporate institutions. The gallery boasts a robust exhibition schedule, featuring a minimum of eight rotating exhibitions each year.
Baker—Hall is a proud member of NADA.
1294 NW 29th St.
Miami, FL 33142
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