Close Looking No. 12: Choice is Yours

Christina Habibi

Choice Is Yours, 2026
30 × 40 × .75 inches
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas

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We can be surrounded and still be separate.

Everything presses close in this painting, with little room to retreat. But closeness doesn't necessarily produce connection. Sometimes it makes the boundaries between things more apparent.

I've been thinking about how familiar that condition has become. We have extraordinary access to one another now. Other lives, opinions, images, crises and conversations arrive constantly. Very little happens entirely outside our awareness. Yet being exposed to more of one another hasn't necessarily made us less isolated.

There are different ways of being together. We can occupy the same spaces without really entering one another's worlds. We can know what someone is doing without knowing them. We can witness almost everything and still remain apart.

What interests me is the impulse that persists despite that separation: the instinct to make contact even when something intervenes. Not to overcome it or make it disappear, but to reach through the conditions that already exist.

Maybe that's one of the contradictions of being human. We create boundaries because we need them, and then spend enormous amounts of our lives trying to find our way through them.

Something in us keeps reaching.