NADA Miami 2025 // Clare Torina

Burnaway x Sheet Cake

Booth B216

Burnaway and Sheet Cake Gallery are pleased to announce a collaboration on a solo presentation of work by Clare Torina in the 23rd edition of NADA Miami, held December 2nd through 6th at Ice Palace Studios.

Clare Torina is a New York-based, Memphis-raised multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between painting, sculpture, and installation. Across mediums, Torina investigates the objects we carry, wear, and worship—tracking how meaning accrues to familiar things and how that meaning erodes through mass production and repetition. Her sculptures and paintings often begin with research: the contested folklore of the rabbit's foot, the political origins of friendship bracelets, the slow commercialization of symbols once sacred. "There's a sadness to this," she has noted. "Most things I choose have gone through the commercial ringer and had their histories ignored."

For NADA Miami, Torina presents a body of new paintings and sculptures that play with concealment, texture, and scale. Central to the presentation is Pockets Regina, a large-scale ink on canvas work embedded with unique paintings, drawings, and objects—secrets literally sewn into the surface. The piece extends Torina's long interest in what remains hidden in plain sight: the histories folded into everyday things, the private meanings we tuck away.

The presentation also features paintings on black velvet, a material Torina has returned to for its formal properties—light-absorbing, tactile, rich with associations both devotional and domestic. Works like Sightseers and Keeper use the velvet ground to pull imagery into shadow, withholding as much as they reveal. It is an approach informed by what the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki called the beauty of shadow: the idea that dimness and obscurity allow us to see more truthfully than brightness ever could.

Alongside these larger works, Torina presents Little Legend, a sculpture of paint swatch rings recontextualizing colors from her monumental 2024 outdoor work l-e-g-e-n-d—a 125-foot beaded jump rope installed at NADA Miami last year. She also debuts Grave Goods, a pearl necklace rendered in oil on wood with waxed cord and brass, methodical and novel in its construction.

A collection of miniature paintings on board rounds out the presentation. Intimate in scale—some barely larger than a postage stamp—these works carry titles that flicker between humor and unease: Hide From God, Fat Cat, Eavesdropper, Blanket Palace. They are entry points into Torina's world, small windows onto a practice that rewards sustained looking.

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Clare Torina was raised in Memphis, Tennessee and is currently based in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College, Memphis; Artport, Kensington, NY; Stanley Brown Jewelist, Chicago; and the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY. She has been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and an education fellow at the Wassaic Project. In addition to her own practice, Torina co-runs Flyweight, a 1:12 scale mobile exhibition space for solo projects. She received her BFA from the University of Memphis and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sheet Cake Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located at 405 Monroe Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee. The gallery supports artists based in and connected to the American South, with an intentional focus on women, queer artists, and artists of color.

Burnaway is an Atlanta-based nonprofit magazine of contemporary art and criticism from the American South, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. Through its editorial program and cultivation of emerging arts writers, Burnaway connects the region's diverse creative communities and develops exchange between Southern art and national and international audiences.