New York-born artist Shaniqwa Jarvis, renowned for her photography and portraiture, is exhibiting If You Can See My Thoughts, You Would See Your Faces at Anthony Gallery in Chicago through April 12th. In it, she builds a bridge out of photographs, painted works, and textile materials to connect the present with the past, invoking those apparitions (or are they memories?) of years gone by. 

In an effort to understand the ways that our previous experience, social habitats, and memories mold us over time, Jarvis displays a new video piece where she takes archival imagery from her adolescence and mixes it with newly recorded video and audio that consider topics of health, art, worth, and motherhood. To an audience of gallery visitors, Jarvis airs conversations between herself and other familiar voices of her intellectual and creative spaces. 

In a sequence of photos, what Jarvis communicates to the viewer can only be described as trying to remember a dream. As a child, perhaps you can recall playing in the yard, but the only image your mind can conjure up is how the fence looked, the color of the grass, or the way flowers blossomed from a tree above your head. To complement the experience of a fleeting memory, If You Can See My Thoughts, You Would See Your Faces is accompanied by air fresheners throughout, co-created by Jarvis in collaboration with Opening Ceremony co-founder Carol Lim. Titled Cowboy Cologne and Money Tree, these scents mark the debut of their fragrance idea, Whiffworld. 

Jarvis taps into those natural sensory details that help to pull us back into a singular moment, all the while standing still in the present. If You Can See My Thoughts, You Would See Your Faces raises questions of home: can it only exist in what we remember, or is it an ever-evolving definition, living in our minds and changing with us as we grow older?