April 10, 2026 - New York 🌷

Dear Rina,

What is friendship? A half blank page, the bottom filled with loop-di-loops; another half page of calligraphic nonsense. Floating, cropped off the bottom right in playful cursive: An Enig. An enigma?

What appears like a contemporary drawing is a spread from a 19th-century friendship album by a 17-year-old MaryMagdalene Russel. Young women, like her, filled pages with poetry, watercolors, and mementos, such as locks of hair, to memorialize friendships. After studying these albums at the New York Public Library, you created a suite of paintings that, in turn, memorialize the albums and the practice of their making. Alongside these paintings, you’ve made others to commemorate your own relationships. In your painted ode to Mary Magdalene’s pondering, the album spread swims in a bronze patina surrounded by distorted renditions of the text, as if peering through the edges of a magnifying glass.

In other works, you render the fore-edge of an album and the patterned interior of an envelope, translating paper into oil paint trompe l’oeil. The meticulously replicated, gestural scrawls appear as organic as the handwritten originals. Rina,your urge to solidify the casual collages and doodles from these albums speaks to your devotion to friendship and your anxiety that it will never be recognized formally.

In what ways do friendships get memorialized in 2026? In a tribute to one of your companionships, you draw leaf- and banner-like shapes from one of the albums and populate them with lists of alliterative words—one shape for b, c, d, etc.—which you explained are the most common phrases pulled from your text message thread with your friend, Joanne, categorized alphabetically. Smart phones do a decent job cataloguing the majority of our communication, but a record must be essentialized—as opposed to an archive of every detail—to be a functioning monument.

Throughout the exhibition, forms float in the foreground between the viewer and your textural backgrounds which remind me of a book’s end papers. In some cases these are velvet beanbags used to delicately hold pages and in others they are decorative shapes appropriated from the albums. Both read like enigmatic iconography: symbols on their way to signifying a specific entity but lingering in the unformed state. In another painting, language playfully slips: be which? bewitch. The gestures from the friendship albums don’t have codified significance. They are intimate exchanges between a small group of friends: an interior language like the novel tongue childhood friends or twins use to communicate, gibberish to most ears. Like many forms of dialogue, the intimacy of the exchange can be more importantthan the message, particularly for people whose identities are misunderstood. Getting a message across is life affirming. Perhaps this is what Mary Magdalene Russel meant that friendship is an enigma—that meaning is highly specific within each one.

The life changing injury I experienced at the beginning of this year has shown me the ways in which—practically speaking—friendships are a matter of survival. Yet in significant narratives from novels to films, family andromantic relationships are represented as primary. It’s often assumed that friendships, and the playfulness shared among friends, correspond with adolescence. But your paintings show friendship as something closer to Ursula K. LeGuin’s “basket stories” – rather than the conventional narratives of “spear stories” with heroes and plots, basket stories are “ecological… are made of newts, oats, gossip,” as you describe in your zine. The friendship albums live in this ecology. They consist of tactile exchanges—handcut flower silhouettes pasted on marbled paper, a book passed between friends to sign, their notes at angles reflecting their bodies’ positions. Records ofthese group activities gather meaningful bits, rather than asserting it a priori. Your paintings, likewise, are careful, closely observed documents of organic patterns of exchange, within which the margins become the center story.

-ET