We Were Never Here

Kaliner Gallery, NY

This exhibition weaves together five distinct narratives to explore the porous boundary between presence and absence, and the layered simultaneity of time, and being.

Across the exhibition, the artists trace intersecting temporalities—life and death, ritual and myth, growth and decay. The title, We Were Never Here, suggests a spectral duality – a presence that is already vanishing or not yet fully arrived. Rather than following a linear narrative, the exhibition drifts through cycles and returns, where transformation is constant and nothing remains fixed.

Melanie Vote’s delicate works contemplate mortality with quiet reverence, portraying nature in states of both entropy and renewal—where decay becomes a form of generative transformation.

The predominant themes in Melanie Vote’s work center on time, ecology, and the ephemeral nature of existence. Vote’s layered compositions often carry a haunting resonance. Her work serves as a meditation on impermanence and the transitory nature of human presence. She reminds us that our lives are fleeting, we are temporal, and confronts the inevitability of death—not as an end, but as the Great Unifier—while emphasizing that time moves swiftly and life is brief. Through this lens, her paintings examine what remains and what disappears, probing the deeper question: what traces will we leave behind? At its core, her practice explores existence as a state of continuous metamorphosis—where change is the only constant, and permanence is an illusion.