Devin Leonardi’s “Concordia” focuses on a specific time in America, 1850-1910. Using black ink on paper to reproduce photographs of that period, Leonardi presents familiar scenes characteristic of our collective memory. Many of the photographers cited by the artist are well known to history, including Mathew B. Brady, George N. Barnard and Andrew Russell, while others are lesser known, their pictures having languished for the most part unnoticed until recent publication.

Despite this reliance on images of the past, “Concordia” is not an effort towards historical re-creation. Most of the paintings on view are composed of many different images or, as is the case with the portraits, the original has been edited down to its basic elements. These originals are themselves reproductions culled from books. Although every effort has been made to bring about the appearance of seamlessness in these compositions, they are in essence collages. Through this reworking, Leonardi seeks to remove vital elements within the photographs from their rigid historical contexts, providing a way of contemplating the past outside of the confines in which it is typically preserved.

For Leonardi, old photographs offer a means of engaging with the past in order to apprehend its form, however briefly. In them we are given a glimpse into moments of lived experience that defy the seemingly empty nature of time by remaining somewhat vivid and real. Because they are so far removed from our own present moment they make visible certain truths that are not easily discerned in the modern world. The most obvious of these truths is the realization that the people and places depicted are actually empty husks, traced by light in the dark confines of the camera. The evidence of this temporality remains outside of the flat image, reminding the viewer that the world around them is also temporal and equally subject to the merciless effects of change. This sense of the temporal is made legible through Leonardi’s selection of images in which erosion and degradation are taking their course. In the portraits he provides depictions of people who are poised to move out of their momentary repose into war or death.

By focusing on the nature of change in the original, old images, Leonardi looks to enable a relationship with the past, something he sees as a critical necessity in an age that takes only itself seriously. Forgetting is, after all, a way of solving problems and as the future appears more and more fraught with difficulty, the unique dilemmas we face have the potential to cut us off completely. Leonardi hopes to remind us that the break with history has become so marked that our own era threatens to destroy every element of the past that doesn’t in some way provide a mirror for its own present concerns.