GRUIN X 8 Wall Gallery
Three women come together across oceans and time zones: artist Jay Miriam from New York, 8 Wall director Sam Houben from Sydney, and Emerald Gruin of Gruin Gallery in Los Angeles.
All are mothers. All carry parallel lives shaped by care, creativity, and quiet resilience. Their meeting at Sydney’s newest female-led gallery as Jay’s inaugural Australian solo show feels less like a coincidence than a constellation—an intuitive alignment of energies, histories, and futures.
Jay Miriam’s paintings emerge from a place of daydreaming where fantasy and reality fold into one another. Scenes drift between domestic ritual and theatrical reverie: women in gardens, hands cutting fish, wine, swans waddling in courtyards, water pouring from jugs, figures moving like commedia dell’arte actors in The People Pleasers. These are not narratives in the traditional sense, but fragments—emotional snapshots suspended between memory and invention. Because it is painted, each moment is permanently paused. There is a stillness here—a presence. The works exist in the moment, offering a gentle meditation on colour and on how quickly life passes by. Feelings, smells, fleeting thoughts—our brains store them briefly before they dissolve. But painting solidifies experience. What might otherwise disappear becomes acknowledged, validated, and enjoyed.
These works ask us to slow down.
To feel the moment.
To sit with it.