The horizon is the beginning and the end. The anchor of depth perception in art—and in life. This August, it’s the focus of Slip House’s second show on Martha’s Vineyard. The 22 new and recent paintings on view by seven artists—Sebastián Espejo, Maude Maris, Jasmine McGlade, Lucas Fernando Rubly, Sarah Schlesinger, Anne Hayden Stevens, and Greta Waller—all involve a prominent horizon line, depicted across landscapes both real and imagined as well as within still lives. In the presentation, which unfolds in a rectangular carriage house on Chappaquiddick Island, the pieces hang so that their respective horizons float at the same level. Meanwhile, the building opens to Katama Bay, revealing a patchwork of blue-grey sea and lush green land stretching to the sky.

This interplay between observable reality and its representation is key to the show. “There is the way we can orient ourselves within space, but then painting is not entirely embedded in real space,” says Ingrid Lundgren, founder of Slip House, which is otherwise headquartered in a historically landmarked townhouse in Manhattan’s East Village. “It’s based in process and the experience of the artist painting or drawing on canvas,” she adds.

The bright, expressionistic landscape style of Chicago-based Stevens became a starting point for Lundgren’s curation. The artist, who has adapted the distinctive spatial organization of traditional Chinese landscape painting into her practice, made seven canvases for the exhibition last May while living on the New England island. Stevens’ paintings, while rendered in high-contrast combinations of purples, pinks, blues, yellows, reds, and greens, depict sketchy, hazy outlines of land masses, tree silhouettes, tracts of grass, and, of course, big expanses of sky. “There’s this blurriness of what’s real? What’s imagined? What’s atmosphere? What’s just a line on a canvas?” says Lundgren. Pushing further toward the dreamlike is View, 2026, by Brooklyn-based Schlesinger, brimming with a ruffled patch of ocean surface plus just a sliver of green-yellow sky visible in the upper register. Elsewhere, two untitled pieces by Chilean artist Espejo frame scenes of trees and grass, both rendered in short, organized brushstrokes as if stitches in a tapestry, with trompe l’oeil wooden frames.

Countering the more literal horizons, the still life Carnation with Cherries, 2026 by Los Angeles-based Waller portrays red cherries in a blue toile de Jouy-patterned bowl and a white flower in a glass against a black curtain that cascades over unseen solid surfaces: Here, the technical horizon line is manufactured. But with Waller’s Sea Urchin, 2026, which depicts a single black spiky specimen as viewed from above on a blue-rimmed tray, the creature’s spines, sticking out in all directions, are the main visual devices creating depth, thereby themselves becoming sort of manifold horizons within the painting’s reality. (In the gallery, Sea Urchin hangs lower to the ground, lining up with a stretch of water in a neighboring composition by Stevens.)

Across this assortment, “Horizons,” too, is a reflection of Martha’s Vineyard, between human developments and protected swathes of nature. Within and without the gallery space, it’s a place to lose yourself as the ocean air carries your mind’s eye far into the distance.