Tiyana Mitchell

About

Tiyana Mitchell’s practice is grounded in photographic archives—family histories, anonymous images, and circulating fragments—approached as living documents rather than fixed records.

Her paintings begin with close looking: the way a gesture, a shadow, a fold in fabric, or a peripheral detail can pull an image out of its original context and into a new narrative. Translating photographs into paint, Mitchell tests what the camera appears to confirm against what memory reshapes over time, asking how images both preserve and distort the lives they depict.

Mitchell is also a keen photographer, and her relationship to the archive is guided by care: an attention to the spirit of the original image, even as she crops, isolates, and reframes it. Her paintings often hinge on what is withheld—edges cut away, faces partially obscured, backgrounds softened—creating a productive tension between intimacy and distance. In this way, painting becomes a form of correspondence across generations: an unresolved conversation between granddaughter and grandfather, conducted through the fragments that survive.

Through strategies of cropping, partial concealment, and subtle shifts in focus, Mitchell’s work explores how identity, memory, and belonging are constructed, interrupted, and preserved. By presenting only part of the story, her paintings invite viewers into a shared act of looking—toward what remains just out of reach, and toward what images cannot fully name.

Exhibitions