Rest Assured, Progress Is Being Made

Rest Assured, Progress Is Being Made continues Shaniqwa Jarvis’s ongoing interest in process, not as a means to an end, but as a way of understanding how meaning accumulates over time. The exhibition brings together works from different moments in Jarvis’s life and practice: prints from Everywhere You Go, There You Are, color proofs from her book Guts, childhood photographs, damaged negatives, earlier paintings, collages, and newly created works. Rather than treating these materials as separate chapters, Jarvis returns to them, allowing them to shift and enter into new relationships.

The title began with a familiar idea surrounding an artist’s practice: the act of watching. There is often a period in which people observe an artist’s work to determine whether progress is being made—to see whether the work is developing and where it might be going. Jarvis turns that expectation into both a reassurance and a question. What does progress actually look like? Must it mean constantly producing something new or leaving the past behind?

For Jarvis, progress can also mean returning.

Across the exhibition, images move through repeated acts of translation. Paper towel paintings are transformed into hard surfaces, paper paintings are transferred onto fabric, and photographs are printed on mirrored surfaces, layered, painted over, and collaged. Existing works and images are treated not as finished objects, but as material with the potential for another life. Through these transformations, Jarvis returns to the act of looking, considering spectatorship as an active exchange.The works resist a single, fixed view, requiring the viewer to move, shift perspective, and physically negotiate what can and cannot be seen. In some works, images are revealed only through a change in position; in others, silk is suspended before mirrored photographs, creating shifting double exposures that change with the viewer’s movement.

This process extends to Jarvis’s practice as a whole. Looking back, she recognizes a continuity between her editorial work, fine art practice, childhood photographs, and the subjects that have continued to attract her attention. In one collage, photographs Jarvis took at age eight of flower sellers at a market in Africa are cut apart and placed onto watercolors she made later in a hotel. The work connects two moments separated by decades, revealing that her fascination with flowers—and the ways they can be seen, arranged, and represented—was already present in childhood.

Other works similarly bring the past into the present. A damaged negative, once the result of an accident, becomes the basis for a new collage. Prints from an earlier exhibition and color proofs are returned to and transformed. Meaning does not always arrive when an image is first made; sometimes it requires time, distance, and another encounter. At a moment when artistic progress is often measured through speed, productivity, and constant novelty, Jarvis proposes another rhythm. Progress can be cumulative, cyclical, and difficult to recognize while it is happening. It can look like returning to something rather than moving away from it, and realizing that the thread connecting disparate moments was present all along.

Rest Assured, Progress Is Being Made is ultimately about recognizing what has been there from the beginning, and allowing it to continue becoming.