Saturday, Mar 14, 2026

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Some photographs offer a crystalline vision, an intimation of how the world would look if only our eyesight were finer and more powerful. Others remind us that things can slip in and out of view, eluding the gaze. The latter group includes the work of Genesis Báez. Shadows and reflections, condensation and blur—the nine color photographs in her exhibition “Holding Water” accentuated everything that interferes with the camera’s ability to capture its object. At times, the results verged on illusionism. In Crossing Time, 2022/2025, for instance, we saw a woman in a partially darkened space crouched on what appears to be a couch, her head turned away from the viewer and toward the wall behind her. In her raised right hand, she grasps a long cord—or perhaps a metallic chain—which is then clasped in the background by another figure, visible only as a shadow cast in what might be a patch of light flooding through a partially covered window. But how can this strand be held by both a flesh-and-blood human and some penumbral entity? At first it seems that the nebulous figure is on our side, perhaps even behind the camera, but that doesn’t solve the conundrum of the string, which cannot be both physical and immaterial at once. There’s some kind of trick here which, impossible to reconcile with our eyes, becomes a mystery. A description of this image, you’ll have noticed, demands repeated acknowledgment of uncertainty—of what might be or what seems to be.

by Barry Schwabsky