“Presence of Absence: Looking In + Looking Out #1” (pigment print, lucite oil and wood), by Boston-based artist Jennifer Liston Munson, in her show “Presence of Absence,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, July 4-July 30
The gallery says:
”Ghostly figures in found photographs of unnamed relatives from Jennifer Liston Munson’s unknown past occupy a landscape of inherited memory. Photographs are buried in resin, holding the figures in time and space, allowing them to look out as we look in. Liston Munson asks the viewer to linger on these elegiac images as an act of resurrection, to substantiate the precariousness of personal histories and the delicate process of perception.
“In some of the pieces, Liston Munson makes the landscape the subject; spaces, trees, and enigmatic watery pools that remain while the bodies they contain dissolve to time, as layers of paint ooze from the edges to mark the art-making process and the past. Other works look at architecture and history close up, making the past present. A series from an interior room of the Alcazar in Toledo, Spain captures bullet holes in worn wallpaper caught in the crossfire of the Spanish Civil War. New sculptural towers layer colorized resin blocks that obscure buried images of objects normally held in museum vitrines, detached from their cultures of origin for eternity.’’
