Beseech by Justin Earl Grant

In Grant’s solo exhibition , he transforms the gallery into a dimly lit installation where portraits hang suspended from the ceiling, creating the sensation of floating presences. Expressive, loosely rendered portraits — dipped in wax for a translucent, candlelit glow — invite viewers to navigate among them.

While each work is available for purchase, resists the conventions of a commercial gallery show. “The installation is meant to be experienced as an environment — a gathering of presences,” Grant says. “It’s about connection, about asking and listening.”

With a practice shaped by continents, cultures, and centuries of art history, Grant’s work continues to build bridges — between traditions, between people, and between the past and the imagined worlds to come.

Thursday, September 18, from 6 to 8pm - Opening reception

Saturday, October 11, 2pm to 4pm - Artist Talk

Saturday October 11 and Thursday October 16, 6pm to 8pm - Art Therapy Workshop hosted by Kim Pham

By Martín De León

Ask yourself.

Ballooned by your own body—looking up to see your face violently falling from the Earth’s inner eyelid that is the sky—is there anything you wouldn’t do for you? The body is an essay. Your eyelids blink silent supplications hoping you’ll hear yourself see. Your mouth is a closed parenthesis to a question waiting to be born.

(If not now, when?)

In his exhibit of 30 mixed media works, Beseech, Justin Earl Grant creates a phantasmagoric universe of portraits that depend on you. Haunting you like a prayer in a language you don’t speak. Printed on handtorn photographic backdrop paper, each portrait is interrogative. Everybody going thru it. The mixed media pieces are composed of graphite, ink, oil, pastel, chalk pastel, and watercolor. Each untitled piece is filled with jagged swords of noisy light wishing a tiny death upon silence.

Portraits, for the first time, makeup an entire show by Justin Earl Grant. Where his early work focused on the glory of abstraction, Beseech, affirms the human-sized hole that is our

reality’s sun. The ghost of this exhibit began as a remix of Henri Matisse’s 1905 painting, The Green Stripe, and grew to include a secret royal family (go find them) and a newly

incorporated technique where Grant dipped works in beeswax (i am trapped in this parenthesis please call my parents) to create a muted hum eternalizing the agony of

time.

Beseech reminds us that to remember is to impose a gentle terrorism upon oneself. We must beg of ourselves with all the weight of being alive. Asking for help is a horror, but Grant’s portraits show us no greater pain exists than failing to show up for yourself. Yet a hope stubbornly hides in these works.

Unshaped, screaming, grabbing you by the throat.

Asking you.

Will you help me?

The exhibition Beseech is partially funded by the City of Houston though the Houston Arts Alliance.

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