Cameo — Nora Riggs

Tappeto Volante is pleased to present Cameo, Nora Riggs’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring recent paintings, the exhibition explores how images recur across time, gathering new meanings as they return. Interwoven figures, patterned surfaces, and familiar objects situate growth, aging, loss, and recollection in scenes shaped by adolescence, vintage imagery, and 1990s aesthetics.

Throughout the exhibition, the close arrangement of bodies and decorative motifs gives everyday scenes the density of remembered experience. Domestic life unfolds through intimacy, care, and the rituals of dressing, resting, and sharing space. Riggs approaches this traditionally feminine realm as a place where relationships between generations develop and ideas of womanhood are inherited, questioned, and reshaped through clothing, gesture, and ordinary objects.

Aerial viewpoints and distorted perspectives allow the viewer to hover above these private environments. In Couple Sleeping, 2026, two reclining figures fill a tightly framed bed, their folded limbs interlocking with patterned textiles. The woman curls beneath a blue covering, while the man lies largely exposed beside her, his checked shorts introducing a contrasting rhythm. Their different bodily temperatures seem almost palpable: one seeks warmth beneath the blanket while the other releases it into the room. The scene’s familiarity gives it an immediate physical presence, even as the sleepers remain absorbed in separate interior worlds. Fabric textures acquire the psychological intensity of Domenico Gnoli’s domestic surfaces, binding the figures together and lending their quiet proximity a sense of monumentality.

Watching her child move through adolescence has led Riggs to revisit her own youth, recognizing familiar patterns alongside changes in how a new generation expresses identity. In Dressing Room, 2026 two figures adjust their appearance amid hanging garments, shoes, and a mirror. Checks, stripes, and saturated colors organize the shallow interior into a choreography of self-presentation. The playful interaction of contour, ornament, and gesture recalls William Copley’s theatrical interiors. Getting dressed becomes a negotiation between private identity and public appearance, with clothing registering the shifting codes of gender, taste, and belonging.

In Bather, 2026, the familiar morning ritual of washing becomes a moment of solitude and bodily awareness. The monumental figure fills the canvas with an emblematic presence, recalling the solidity of ancient Mesoamerican sculpture and the narrative power of Central American modernist murals. An everyday act of caring for the body becomes an image of vulnerability, introspection, and endurance.

Three small oval paintings of stylized adolescent profiles give the exhibition its title. Their self-conscious, anxious personalities animate a format historically associated with the cameo’s idealized image of femininity. Cameo also describes the brief appearance of a recognizable person within a fictional world. Riggs’s figures inhabit this double meaning: they retain traces of people she knows while assuming new roles within the paintings. Lace and bows recur as reminders of how ideas of femininity are passed down, questioned, and reshaped.

Cameo brings the pleasures of daily life into close proximity with the experience of loss, attentive to the ways people change and the traces they leave in one another’s lives.