Annie Blazejack & Geddes Levenson

Satchel Projects is delighted to present Feast of Endings, an exhibition of recent paintings by collaborative artist duo Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson.

Feast of Endings brings together a group of Blazejack and Levenson’s recent oil and acrylic paintings, conjuring sites of interaction between humans and the natural world. In these works, nocturnal landscapes are populated by creatures and humans engaged in enigmatic interactions and activities. Muted, dusky, or black-on-black tones are punctuated by flashes of intense fluorescent color. The paintings are at once recognizable and strange, inviting viewers to look again as new relationships and possible outcomes emerge.

The artists describe our current moment as one of “peak separation” between humans and nature, when the effort required to maintain the divide has become unsustainable and “eventually we will have to collapse back together.” Their paintings imagine what this convergence might look like, approaching an uncertain future through fantastical images and narratives that make the prospect of change less frightening.

Blazejack and Levenson have been making paintings together for over a decade, developing a collaborative process that combines planning with improvisation. Working from sketches, photographs, and assembled compositions, they develop scenes that take shape in paint and often change direction along the way. Each artist takes turns working on a painting where the other has left off, responding to and sometimes revising what is already there. Their individual approaches remain in play, and the paintings become a record of their ongoing exchange.

In Feast of Endings, impending collapse opens up the possibility of transformation. Blazejack and Levenson consider the fall of an empire and the end of a mindset organized around human dominion and the relentless consumption of nature. What might follow when that way of living can no longer be sustained? The artists suggest that extravagance might take a different form, like the extravagance of a tree shedding all of its leaves in autumn, year after year. An ending need not be only a loss; it may also make room for something not yet imagined.

Geddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack are collaborative painters living and working in Durham, NC. They have been creating and exhibiting work together for over a decade, exploring the relationship between humans and ecosystems as climate change becomes increasingly inevitable. Their exhibitions include solo presentations at the Vero Beach Museum of Art (Vero Beach, FL); Ortega Y Gasset Projects: The Skirt (Brooklyn, NY); Anchorlight (Raleigh, NC); The Carrack (Durham, NC); the Art and Culture Center (Hollywood, FL); and Placeholder Gallery (Miami, FL). They have also exhibited at the National Liberty Museum (Philadelphia, PA); the Contemporary Art Museum (Raleigh, NC); Locust Projects (Miami, FL); and First Street Gallery (New York, NY). Blazejack received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, and Levenson received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.