Exhibition: Be Longing

Those who live in glass houses (goes the saying) should not throw stones. But we surround ourselves daily with glass: buildings and touchscreens, windshields, and lenses. The modern condition is to invent more and more profound insides and then try to name the ache for the outsides we created by default. A global pandemic underscored this pain, the world without forbidden by the noble desire to protect what we love. Cameras and windows–Plato’s shadows of the outside–became a way through if not truly out.

Portraits of this yearning are captured in Be Longing, a collection of ink drawings by Shanti Grumbine and photographs by Frank De León Jones. These pieces glimpse through a glass–darkly, sometimes, but also playfully, slyly, hopefully. The lenses the artists peer through divide inside from out, but bring an interstitial voice of their own, distorting and retelling what is meant to be seen.

Grumbine’s gel pen drawings leap from personal still photos of world cities as windowscapes. Her work plays with the long formal history of windows in art, from Renaissance to Symbolism to Minimalism. Orderly grids interrupt the pictorial space and gesture to what may lie beyond the frames. The pane–however perfectly transparent–is a reminder of the uncertain role of the viewer in the hierarchy of the image. Even matter is uncertain here, with Grumbine’s stippled lines evoking the vibration of particles, true stillness always past our reach (or is it a state of mind?)

De León Jones opens the pages of a vacation photo album of an uncertain place, time, or photographer. Gauzy focus and extremes of light/exposure create an ambiguity echoed in the subjects at play on a beach. Posed or candid? Love or voyeurism? The viewer gets no easy answers as to whether the “voice” behind these photos is inside or outside the subjects’ awareness.

Be Longing juxtaposes these two artists to emphasize those common themes of imagery that are simultaneously true and uncertain. Lenses remind the audience not to trust the seen completely–even through the first two lenses of the eyes–but also that there is beauty in yearning for some things that may never be real.