The Space Between Things

October 2, 2026

The Sky I Keep Exhibit at SCAD MOA

When Othiana Roffiel first came SCAD, she was caught between two ways of seeing the world. Photography or painting. She walked into the photography building, looked around, then walked into the painting building. Something changed.

“I didn’t feel what I felt when I went into the painting building,” she remembers.

Roffiel graduated from SCAD in 2012 with a B.F.A. in painting and returned to Savannah this fall for The Sky I Keep, her solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art. The show brings together paintings created between 2021 and 2025, connecting different periods of an artist whose work has continued to evolve long after she left Savannah. Today, she lives and works in Mexico City, where she was born.

Painting won that early argument with photography for a reason. Roffiel was drawn not simply to what paint could depict, but to paint itself. “There’s something that has always drawn me to painting, and it has to do with its materiality,” she says. “My poison is oil. Oil paint is what I love to use.”

Spend time with her work and that distinction starts to make sense. The paintings in The Sky I Keep suggest bodies, landscapes, mountains, sky, memory and something cosmic, but they rarely settle into one answer. A form that looks anatomical for a moment might become geological the next. Roffiel wants that uncertainty. In fact, she protects it.

“I like the idea of the painting not being fully resolved,” she says. “When a painting is resolved, not only does it become boring, but it doesn’t give room for the viewer to be part of the work.”

That may be the best way into Roffiel’s paintings. Stop trying to figure them out.

We live in a world where images arrive already explained. Scroll, understand, react, move on.

Roffiel is interested in almost the opposite experience. She paints largely from memory and imagination rather than visual references, leaving enough ambiguity for someone standing in front of the canvas to bring their own memories into it.

“We live in a world saturated with images, especially images on our screens, and many of those images, everything’s resolved,” she says. Her paintings deliberately resist that instant consumption. They ask for something increasingly rare: attention.

Even Roffiel does not always know where they are taking her.

“I might begin the painting with the idea of this memory I’m trying to evoke, and I try to take that painting that direction, but the painting takes me somewhere else,” she says. “Painting has a will of its own, and it’s so stubborn sometimes.”

There is something wonderfully human in that idea, especially coming from an artist more than a decade into her career. Becoming better has not meant gaining complete control. It has meant learning when to surrender it.

“The evolution of an artist for me in the last years has been to learn to listen, you know, to where a painting wants to go and what it has to say.”

That listening became part of building The Sky I Keep. Roffiel had to look across several years of work and decide which paintings belonged together. Some had never hung beside one another.

Much of the initial process happened remotely, through Zoom sessions and digital models of the museum space, before artist, curator and paintings finally occupied the same room.

“We wanted to show a selection that reflected the evolution of my visual language throughout the last years,” she says, “but also showed those threads that connect the work across time.”

The room itself became part of the work. Scale, wall color, spacing and silence mattered. Roffiel wanted enough breathing room for visitors to slow down rather than simply move from painting to painting. “We wanted to create an atmosphere that was very welcoming and that invited the viewer to be in the space, to be present,” she says, “to allow for that connection, stillness, attention, silence that we so much long for and need.”

That feels particularly fitting for her return to Savannah. The city where Roffiel once walked into a painting building and felt something she could not quite explain is now being asked to walk into a museum and do the same thing with her work.

And perhaps that is the point.

“I would feel very honored if you would be here for an hour,” she told me as we talked about the almost forgotten practice of simply sitting with a work of art.

An hour might be ambitious. Start with ten minutes.

Put the phone away. Stop looking for the answer. Let the painting remain unresolved.

Roffiel has left room for you.

See It: The Sky I Keep is on view through this Sunday at the SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd. The museum is open Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday from noon–5 p.m.