Trust Me

In Crossing Time, Genesis Báez represents intergenerational ties with a length of thread supported on one end by her mother. The artist’s shadow appears to hold up the other end, creating the illusion of an unbroken line between the disparate worlds of the two figures. Through such carefully staged tableaux—mostly featuring the women in her family—Báez’s photographs convey the many forms of distance felt by members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and how gesture and touch can bridge them. Báez grew up between Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, and her work reflects this inherent tension, a sense of place and belonging “disrupted,” as the artist has said, “by migration, colonial legacies, and climate change.” Cinematic and sometimes surreal, the images offer potential answers to impossible questions: How does one photograph a whisper, for example, or describe the sound of a circle? Can a certain slant of golden light, and the shadows of bodies, reveal hidden pathways and points of connection?