The Space Between — John Edmonds

Company Gallery is pleased to announce The Space Between, John Edmonds’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view September 10 – October 24, 2026. This presentation brings together Edmonds’s photographs alongside an installation of sculptures, books, and archival photographs selected by the artist from the collection of the Museum of Art and Origins.

The Space Between developed through Edmonds’s sustained relationship with artist and scholar George Nelson Preston, who founded the Museum of Art and Origins in 2006. Located within Preston’s historic brownstone in Washington Heights, the Museum serves as a home, community gathering space, bed-and-breakfast, and by-appointment institution, with a permanent collection focused primarily on Classical African art. Here, Preston’s daily life and the Museum are inseparable: the residence is at once intimate and encyclopedic, replete with dozens of hand-carved sculptures, photographs taken during Preston’s extensive travels, stacks of personal effects and reading materials, and Preston’s own mixed-media paintings.

For this exhibition, John Edmonds takes stock of the Museum’s extraordinary density and singularity, as well as its spiritual and communal significance. Across fourteen photographs made in the Museum’s rooms since 2024, Edmonds orchestrates a variety of encounters with the abundance of figurative sculptures that populate the space. Through a tilt of the head, a hand at rest, or a shared expression, gesture becomes the point of contact between Edmonds’s live subjects and the Museum’s historic sculptures, which are largely associated with the peoples of West and Sub Saharan Africa. As the boundaries between person and object, past and present, and observer and observed begin to dissolve, the photographs pose a larger question: what can be discovered in these potent spaces between? Edmonds’s sensitivity to light and color brings these enigmatic exchanges into sharper focus.

Born nearly fifty years apart, Edmonds (b. 1989) and Preston (b. 1938) were introduced in 2019, shortly before Edmonds’s solo exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum. Their encounter began an ongoing mentorship shaped by Preston’s knowledge and belief in the importance of artistic lineage, and led to Edmonds’s pivotal first trip to Ghana in 2020. For this exhibition, Edmonds has selected sculptures, archival photographs and books from Preston’s collection to present alongside his own photographs, deliberately blurring the boundaries between authorship, history, and lineage.

The Space Between considers the thresholds between public and private space; the living and the ancestral; the material and the sacred; and Black life and its connections to Africa. Through his photographs and selections from Preston’s collection, Edmonds distills the distinctive character of the Museum of Art and Origins, paying tribute to Preston’s unconventional wisdom and to the elders who have shaped him. In doing so, Edmonds weaves an intergenerational fabric, bringing historical objects into the textures of daily life in New York City.