And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses”

Make Room is pleased to present And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, a group exhibition of fifteen artists. The title is John Berger's, from a book he published in 1984. “The visible brings the world to us,” he writes there. “But at the same time reminds us ceaselessly that it is a world in which we risk to be lost.” The exhibition takes that double motion as its premise. Each work here shows something and, in the same gesture, marks the distance the seeing cannot close.

Some of the works keep watch over what has already gone. Dane Nakama sets lit candles inside a ceramic vessel and lets them burn down over the course of the show. Justin Cole paints heads whose faces have turned to smoke or light, withheld at the moment the viewer looks for them. Ken Higaki's Solitude of Remembering holds a single figure against an empty ground, half in shadow. Vita Kari suspends a length of jacquard and unweaves it by hand, thread by thread, until the woven picture is gone and only its structure is left hanging. Yassi Mazandi's The story of MataHari prints, on Japanese paper, the last embrace before a woman is taken to a firing squad. The held hand stays solid while the rest of the kiss fades into memory, the first and last thing a body knows.

Others measure distance across places beyond time. Aleza Zheng paints sorghum fields drawn from Chinese literature and film. Yeni Mao screenprints a desert onto wool felt, using the ground as a figure for migration and restraint. Shuyi Cao's stoneware takes the form of a fossil and holds geologic and diasporic time in one object. Laura Watters, Sophia Anthony, Jacopo Pagin, Shana Hoehn, Nicholas DePass, and Anne Marie Boardman work with interiors, thresholds, and figures caught between reverie and unease.

Berger writes that a photograph stops time, and that the thing it holds has already moved on. The works in this exhibition begin from that fact. They hold a place for what is absent, and they leave the distance open.