Blazejack + Levenson

Great Hall Exhibition by Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson

800 Taylor Street, Durham, NC 27701- look for the “Arts” sign on the building and enter through the main doors on the left.

We, Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson, are engaged in a long-term painting collaboration. We’ve been working together for about ten years, learning about each other’s techniques and idea-building processes over time. We started out with various rules and systems for co-creation, training ourselves to blend our artistic instincts into a unified voice. Now, our practice has become more fluid. Sometimes we pass an idea or image back and forth between individually created works, and sometimes we paint together on the same canvas, layering over each other’s brush strokes.

The paintings form an ongoing conversation, building towards ideas better than either of us could imagine alone. We challenge each other’s expectations and defaults, looking at problems from two different perspectives at once. Think of two eyes pooling information about a three-dimensional world, or two speakers generating stereo surround sound.  Sometimes we refer to our duality in our paintings by including mirrors and wobbly reflections, imperfect copies and repetitions, or scenes that happen both above and below water.

Our narrative paintings examine the interdependence between human-made and wilderness spaces. As the climate warms and ecosystems try to adapt, how will we adapt in kind? Science fiction stories, especially those about human encounters with alien landscapes, help us imagine our changing relationship to wild places with creativity and nuance.