I was a slow eater as a child, perhaps because I truly enjoyed my mother’s cooking. When we experience pleasure, we tend to slow down, stretching time to make it last longer.

I remember dozing off under the blue glow of an electronic bug zapper. My mom’s snoring was loud, and the TV was almost always on, murmuring live pool matches. For my dad, the sharp click of billiard balls colliding, followed by soft “oohs” and “aahs,” was his lullaby.

Most children fall asleep clutching stuffed animals or gripping their baby blankets. I fell asleep holding a strand of my mom’s hair. Holding her hair, I thought about the vast darkness behind closed eyes, how it resembled the city’s light polluted night sky; mostly black, with a star peering, glowing, flickering here and there. I thought about the vastness of the sky, its endlessness, and how it stretched into space, into places we could never reach.

Thinking about this darkness, it lulled me to sleep. Maybe it was the fear of darkness and the condition of not knowing. In the dark, the world becomes something felt rather than merely seen. I find myself drawn not only to what appears clearly in the light, but also to what lingers at its edges; to what we sense, imagine, embody, and cannot fully know.

A Shell, A Peel, A Pause is a three person exhibition featuring works by Miguel Caba, An Hà, and Vivian Tran. The minimal, poetic, and rhythmic title gestures toward sites of protection, transfiguration, and stillness, among other possibilities. Drawing from familiar, everyday objects, imagery, and iconography, the artists breathe life into the mundane.

Caba’s wallpapers depict their grandmother’s distant home, the paintings bridge distance yet exist at a moment paused as their facade slips away. Tran’s wall collage wraps around the interior and stitches disparate narratives together through their horizon lines. Hà reanimates byproducts that are in the periphery of the everyday, echoing past narratives.

The works offer familiar space for daydreaming, inviting viewers to reconsider what might exist beyond the horizon.

Miguel Caba is an artist based in Boston with a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Caba’s practice examines their relationships with people through the lens of objects and spaces in transition. They are a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and Jeffrey Ahn Jr. Fellowship, and have been featured in New American Paintings Issue 176 Northeast.

An Hà is an artist based in Boston whose practice spans found object sculpture, site-responsive installations, and experimental community gatherings. His practice is an exploration of non-linguistic communication—the shared language of objects, hospitality, and being in space together. 

Hà is a recipient of the Opportunity Fund grant from the Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the Julie Graham Prize from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He was named a traveling fellow for the Anne E. Borghesani Memorial Prize from Tufts University and selected as a finalist for the 2025 Boston Public Art Accelerator. He earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2025 and attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art the same year.

Vivian Tran is an interdisciplinary artist based in Boston, MA. Her work often references familiar symbols and actions intrinsic to everyday life. Working primarily in video installation and sculpture, Tran constructs quiet and minimal scenes that are suggestive of narrative, often interweaving moments across time and space. By closely observing overlooked actions and ephemera from daily life, Tran’s work explores when, how, and why the everyday can become profound—revealing a quiet, emotional sensitivity that reminds us of our own aliveness.

Tran attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2023 and was a fellow at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in 2024. She earned a BFA in Studio Art and a BS in Cognitive & Brain Science from Tufts University in 2025. She is a 2025-26 Durational Pedagogies Fellow at Dia Chelsea.