“We have been where you are going.” is a phrase 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 Revised Edition from this collaborative series of photo collages by Barbara Levine and Martin Venezky, featured in this exhibition, explore the horizon line.

Barbara and Martin both collect vernacular photography but the way they respond to their pictures is different and the dialogue between them grounds their work. Barbara recognizes the sublime hiding in plain sight and sees how pictures of apparent limited value often overflow with tension and beauty. Martin, on the other hand, is partial to the unremarkable. The lack of aesthetics reminds him how quickly the images we cherish can empty themselves of value.

For the photographs they make together, Barbara and Martin construct a fresh encounter with the past, and with photography itself, by reorganizing the horizon line to confound time.

They slice apart anonymous photos placing them side by side, combining and recombining to create unexpected juxtapositions. When they discover connections and form relationships, the overwhelming anonymity of any one snapshot gives way to mystery. An inadvertent detail can demand the artists’ full attention. As the composition builds they 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.

Barbara and Martin don’t know the people who populate their photographs but they can embody their boredom, their anxiety, and the desert sun on the backs of their necks. The photographic subjects chose to capture their moments for unknowable reasons. Barbara and Martin have chosen to yoke them together to conjure future places and infinite possibilities. The artists share: “They have been where we are going.”