Do pictures tell the truth or deceive? Do they show us the world or invent the world? Do they make the invisible, the past, the future, the elsewhere, visible to us, through the clairvoyant techniques of framing and illusion? Artists often stage these questions about pictures within their pictures, by means of metaphors like the waking dream, through devices such as anachronism, or the representation of frames, windows, mirrors, even empty canvases, signifying fissures, breaks in continuity. Split Images: Truth and Fiction brings together works from the collection that, through various means, incorporate multiple worlds in a single picture, with the credibility of each in tension—fact in dialogue with fiction, imagination with reality, then with now.

-Pan Wendt, Curator