ARTIST STATEMENT
We, Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson, have been collaborating for over a decade. Together, we make work that tells fantastical ecofeminist stories. In our paintings, we imagine precarious choreographies between women and wild animals, perilous partnerships that only exist because they are frozen on the surface of the canvas. We splash saturated lighting across nightscapes. Fluorescent colors and crisp lines contrast with mushy grays and muted hues. Our portrait subjects return your gaze with bravado - though the eye contact doesn’t always come from a human.
We’ve cultivated a spooky, uncanny humor tuned to surprise viewers into playful reimaginings of human-nature relationships. Are the people and animals in these paintings friend or foe? Who is in danger and who is in charge? The paintings refuse to collapse into a single narrative of what happened next, encouraging spectators to remain open to multiple impossible conflicting narratives.
The paintings are witchy but not in the way you’d expect. We ask: Is it possible to understand nature? Who should be harnessing nature’s powers, and to what end? Our guiding principle is that if you can get confused enough you can stumble into a new reality.
HOW OUR COLLABORATION WORKS
You can think of us as art married, all the art that we make is part of our collaboration, even if it only has one of our hands in it. Our studio has two easels, and we take turns painting. Our brushes overlap until even we can’t tell who painted which part. Each painting evolves out of the other paintings we’ve made like a long conversation.
The process I am describing is not linear. It is more like a genealogy. There are many strands (generations) of painted conversation. These strands merge, diverge, mature, evolve.
ARTIST BIO
Geddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack both grew up in Miami, FL. Their collaborative art practice grew organically from their childhood friendship. In 2013, while attending separate graduate schools, they formalized this collaboration and have been creating and showing work exclusively as a duo ever since. In their paintings and installations, they explore the relationship between humans and ecosystems as climate change becomes increasingly inevitable.
Blazejack received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston/ Tufts University in 2013, and Levenson received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2014.
Notably, Blazejack and Levenson have installed solo shows at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach FL, Ortega Y Gasset Projects Skirt Space, Brooklyn, NY; Lump Projects, Raleigh NC; Anchorlight, Raleigh, NC; The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Placeholder Gallery, Miami, FL; and The White Page Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. They have also shown at The National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; and Norte Maar Art Space, Brooklyn, NY.