Nicolina Morra’s oil paintings investigate longing as a driving force in the human experience. Disillusionment with current conditions, coupled with the desire for an unattainable ideal, can manifest in a search for meaning through secular forms of worship, where power is ascribed to certain figures, rituals, and objects. Morra’s work explores how these forces of longing and devotion reflect the search for transcendence in everyday life.Central to her practice is the recontextualization of images drawn from her expanding personal archive, including stills from cult cinema, contemporary popular culture, and found photographs of anonymous individuals. The original context of these images is disrupted and imbued with new layers of meaning through selective cropping and a blurred painting technique, often paired with hyper-realistic depictions of things that play with the tension between what is within and just out of reach. This process situates her work between the archive and the altar: the archive as a repository of collective memory and imagery, and the altar as a space where these fragments are elevated into symbols of contemporary secular worship and the pursuit of something more.