WHATIFTHEWORLD is delighted to return to Armory’s Focus section, curated by Jessica Bell Brown, with a solo presentation of new works by Mia Chaplin.

Mia Chaplin’s paintings inhabit a space where the sensual and the unsettling meet. Working with thick, tactile layers of oil paint, she treats the canvas as a living surface, its texture evoking the corporeality of skin. Her figures are often caught in ambiguous states, collapsing, embracing, or dissolving into their surroundings, offering images that are at once tender, raw, and resistant to easy consumption. In her work, intimacy is never without tension, beauty is never without an edge, and care is inseparable from its costs.

In the triptych Milk and Honey, Silk and Money, Chaplin stages a lush yet disquieting theatre of the body. Saturated with abundance in the form of fruits, foliage, and folds of skin, the work initially a seduction of flesh, intimacy and femininity. Yet its opulence is troubled by an undercurrent of unease. At its centre, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, drawn from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, becomes a fulcrum for questions of desire, morality, and complicity. Here, binaries dissolve: pleasure and harm, nurture and depletion, beauty and brutality co-exist in a single, tangled ecosystem.

This dualism speaks to Chaplin’s constant inquiry into the labour of femininity and the quiet violences that attend it, emotional, physical, and ecological. Her work is also deeply informed by an unflinching awareness of the prevalence of gender-based violence, a crisis that is prolific in South Africa and echoed across the globe. Through her figures and painterly language, Chaplin gives form to the tensions between intimacy and threat, tenderness and harm, situating her practice within a broader reckoning with the ways in which women’s bodies remain sites of both care and conflict.

Chaplin’s compositions operate in a register that is both sensual and destabilising. The viewer is invited close, drawn in by the tactility of the surface and the intimacy of the scene, only to encounter moments of rupture, expressions, postures, and painterly marks that disrupt visual pleasure. In this way, Milk and Honey, Silk and Money becomes not only an image of abundance, but a site of reckoning: with the excesses we celebrate, the costs we conceal, and the entanglements from which we cannot disentangle ourselves.

Find us at Booth F2. For artwork inquiries, please contact us here.