For our first Ctrl+P exhibition opening in 2020, CEG is pleased to show the collaborative work of Barbara Levine & Martin Venezky! In their series “We have been where you are going,” they create photographic collages based on imaginary horizons scattered across time and place. The artists’ describe this phrase as one that “captures the blurriness between past and present and is a reminder that whatever we wish for has been sought out by others before us.”
The exhibition will be on view from January 17 to March 7, 2020.
Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky discuss their work:
For the photographs we make together, we construct a fresh encounter with the past, and with photography itself, by reorganizing the horizon line to confound time.
We slice apart anonymous photos placing them side by side, combining and recombining to create unexpected juxtapositions. When we discover connections and form relationships, the overwhelming anonymity of any one snapshot gives way to mystery. An inadvertent detail can demand our full attention. As the composition builds we add segments of Martin’s abstract color photographs to connect realism and abstraction to create a challenging immediacy.
The photographic relationship between the pictorial and the abstract is one of the most fundamental understandings of place and time. “Place” is something we carry with us — a summation of our inner memories mapped onto the present landscape as we traverse it. The continuity of the land, though, has its own unbroken time frame and it is much longer and steadier than the interrupted, distracted time we are able to spend with it. While we look for the universal, we are always tripped up by our own presence.
Catherine Edelman Gallery 