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Mylee Etuale
Ia Manatua
Installation view

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale
untitled (Mafutaga), 2026
72 x 60”
Acrylic on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale,
A-Line, 2026
45 x 34”
Acrylic on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale,
Ulaula i le ma’umaga (Smoking in the plantation), 2026
33 x 22”
Acrylic on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale,
Va’a i Salafai (Ferry to Savai’i), 2026
45 x 34”
Acrylic on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale, Ia Manatua
Installation view

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale,
what I really want, 2026
17 x 10.5”
acrylic and poly-cotton on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale,
maybe I will wait for you, 2026
15.5 x 21.5”
acrylic and dried pandanus leaf on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale,
I like you / I like how, 2026
18 x 15”
acrylic and poly-cotton on canvas

Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography

Mylee Etuale, Ia Manatua

Exhibition Opening, October 3, 2026 3-5pm

Regular Gallery Hours Friday and Saturday 11am-4pm , through October 24

Pilele Projects is thrilled to present Ia Manatua, Mylee Etuale’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, opening this coming Saturday, October 3, 2026, from 3-5pm.

Ia Manatua is a Samoan phrase which can be translated as to remember, or to recall. It incorporates a Samoan concept for memory combining the term mana, meaning sacred power or spiritual energy, and tua, meaning back or support. The word ia calls manatua into presence, defines it as an act rather than an abstract concept, and positions it in a system of relationality. For Etuale, the practice of painting enacts the practice of memory. Her images are drawn from her own experience of returning to Samoa from her life in Southern California diaspora, welcomed in family, but also unfamiliar with so much of the language and lifeways that connect her to her ancestral home. Her paintings evince patient observation, joyful participation, and a sense of place, placement, and displacement which are at once vulnerable and assertive. The underlying images are made of photographic fragments, but the paintings emerge from a layered and resolutely manual process which unifies them into singularly resonant emotional chords. Her figures are intimate, but also turned away or partially hidden, sometimes cropped just beyond the edges of her canvases, so that what is given is more a feeling than a person. Similarly, her treatment of color and texture produce a dense generosity at the surface of her paintings which is also the result of a calculated withholding of the kinds of realism that offer up a picture in a single glance. Her paintings do not so much hold her memories as caress them into the present.