Close Looking No. 10: Show Me the Way
Christina Habibi
Show Me the Way, 2026
24 × 30 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint and oil on canvas
Painting details & availability →
Coming together and coming apart can look remarkably similar while they're happening. Something can seem to be finding its shape at the same moment it appears to be losing it.
That ambiguity runs through Show Me the Way. What feels fragmented might be assembling itself or might have just split apart. What appears more fully formed offers no real answer. Each seems to hold information the other doesn't have, as if one could represent a possible future while the other carries the memory of an earlier state.
But looking isn't the same as intervening. There's a sense of being close to a transformation while having very little power over its course. One state can reflect another, recognize something in it, perhaps even anticipate where it's going, without being able to alter what happens next.
I've been thinking about how much of contemporary life is organized around watching things become. Identities, institutions, relationships, technologies and entire systems seem to be continually constructed and dismantled in front of us. We look sideways for evidence of where things are headed, measuring one state against another that appears further along, more certain, more complete.
But we're usually seeing only one moment.
What appears whole may already be changing. What appears scattered may be in the process of forming something new. The distinction between the two is much less reliable than it seems, especially now, when we're surrounded by partial views of changes already underway.
That's what interests me in this painting. No position is really secure enough to become the destination. Each state contains the possibility of another, and looking outward can become a strange way of looking backward or forward at what we were, what we are, or what we might become.
Maybe we look outward for direction because it's difficult to see the shape of change while we're inside it.