Emma Limtiaco’s recent paintings examine the phenomenology of perception; how vision, memory, and material form intersect through time. She refers to this sensibility as “transient lenses”, a term she uses to describe the shifting conditions through which we observe and recall the world. These lenses are not optical but experiential: moments when seeing becomes unstable, suspended between clarity and obscurity. Drawing from memories of familiar yet impermanent spaces, a fogged window, light refracting through scratched glass, or the lingering haze of smoke, Limtiaco constructs visual situations where presence and absence coexist. Her process involves layering, sanding, and erasing paint to evoke the temporal nature of both perception and recollection. What endures on the surface is as much the residue of what has vanished as what remains. Through this interplay of accumulation and loss, Limtiaco invites viewers into a practice of slow looking. Her paintings resist instantaneous interpretation, instead unfolding through duration and attentiveness. In engaging with transient lenses, she reveals perception itself as a mutable exchange, one that mirrors the instability of memory and the quiet persistence of the act of seeing.