SOFT GOODS: On Recurrence, Growth, and Solo Show Anniversaries

Hi friends. I hope this communiqué finds you well. I'm sitting on a flight I've taken over and over, about to do something I've done many times before.

I wanted to welcome you to Soft Goods, the newly-minted home of my b-sides, where my art, process, storytelling and self-reflection intersect. They don't exist without each other, because to be an artist, and one would argue, a human, is inherently to be vulnerable.

It's my belief that we have a responsibility to share. And share I will. Sometimes there will be light news and exhibition information. Other times you will get a banger like today. Read, don't read. Choose your own adventure.

As I've launched and re-launched, thought and re-thought, I keep coming back to one idea: recurrence.

This is not my first time starting something new. If anything, a recurring theme of mine is rebirth and reinvention. I've had as many businesses and projects as I've had lives. They've all had one thing in common: a version of Gaby Viteri shaped by the season I was in. I worked within the boundaries of that season, creating a delicious canon for my practice.

These days, I’m in a very different season. First, I'm single. Second, I'm about to be a full-on empty nester. That’s an immense amount of freedom for someone who spent most of her life married and mothering. And third and most importantly, I am a woman returning to herself. An artist.

I've always been involved in art in one way or another, but I dove completely into my creative journey after my first exhibit, SPEED KILLS, a year ago. The work was a meditation on speed, my speed, after a summer of rupture and grief from losing my mother. A year later, I'm still thinking about speed: how fast the world moves versus how fast we move, and our role in a world that continues to inch toward automation.

Recurrence is also an elegant word for overthinking, which I am guilty of, and which you are participating in today. And overthinking is not a bad thing. I use it as a measuring tool for self-reflection and growth.

Which brings us to growth. At the first anniversary of my first solo show, and right before my second this October, I can look at my work and myself through the lens of recurrence and use it to measure. Happy to report that I've grown. Not just in age, but in wisdom.

Sitting here on this flight, in this recurring role, I'm about to begin a new cycle. The actions are the same. The woman engaging in them is not. The Gaby of 2025 no longer exists. That's not magical realism or woo-woo. It's just facts.

I want to close this cleanly, but I'll leave you with a question instead:

What would you do if you could begin again, again?

Because that's essentially what we are doing, every day, every hour, every minute.

Recurring, revisiting, reworking. It's all fair, and it's all helpful. Hope you do all three and come back to see me here for more of my soft goodness.

GV