Mary Crenshaw: Inhale pairs immigrant portraits with paintings of cigarette butts embedded in city sidewalks — the consumed cigarette as metaphor for the migrant, carelessly discarded and forgotten. Thrifted frames, worn and mismatched, elevate the stubs into portrait-like presences, while loosely rendered faces of real people encountered on buses, in parks, and in stores stretch geographies across the globe. The exhibition holds absence and presence in tension: icons of people who have already left alongside figures free, in Crenshaw's words, to walk off the canvas and live their lives.
