Vacant vacation

“Ventura” (print from ektachrome slide) by Jennifer Liston Munson, in her show “The Camera Sees,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, April 30-May 31.

The gallery says:

“In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote that ‘it is the camera that sees.’ Jennifer Liston Munson’s new work explores the notion that the watchful eye of the camera holds personal narratives not as a memory-keeper but as a foreteller of histories yet to happen.

‘In 2025, Liston Munson opened a garbage bag of family ektachrome slides slotted to be discarded and sifted through the tiny transparent images to view the intensely colored images from her 1960s and 70s past. Some images were vaguely familiar, some were completely unknown but proved her presence on family vacations in Florida—and in Los Angeles where her family moved in 1973. This re-seeing experience presented complexities of reconstructing an unresolved past that includes the deaths of her sister and brother. This new work juxtaposes large-scale translucent prints suspended in space in which the artist allowed AI to erase figures as it interpreted the image to reveal what the camera has held over time.’’

Stare from the deep past

“Athenian fragment of a face,’’ (archival pigment print, oil, resin, wood ), by Boston-based artist Jennifer Liston Munson, in her show “Looking In + Looking Out,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, July 5-July 30.

Her artist’s statement includes:

“Jennifer Liston Munson’s work for her show …. creates lenses for the viewer to look in and for the subjects themselves to look back out. Her selection of art objects, ghostly figures, and landscapes call into question historical collection practices, the complexity of narratives, and the notion of belonging. ‘Looking In + Looking Out’ incorporates images of objects held in museum collections, photographs of unknown relatives, and abandoned historically significant interiors. 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.’’

#Kingston Gallery

We all feel the ‘presence of absence’

“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.’’