Curated by Amy Sillman

AIR includes works by Robert Bordo, Benjamin Butler, John White Cerasulo, Jenny Monick, Laura Newman, Pat Palermo, Pamela Wilson-Ryckman, Howard Smith and Patricia Treib.

This is a group show based on a summer rumination about air. Air is nothing: emptiness, invisible space, interval, void. Air is atmosphere, oxygen, breath. Air is an unseen field felt along the skin of the body, a sensual envelope of smells, a shroud of fog, color itself. Whether pleasant as the force pushing the sailboat or menacing as the inside of the radiation cloud, air surrounds us, enters us and moves through us.

This group show seeks to concretize this invisible by framing it. Some of the artists included propose straightforward relations to the air: a view, storm clouds or particulate fields of garish shimmer. Some work through bodily trace, others through the depiction of a nervous objecthood that materializes in front of us only to collapse into entropy or fade into unrecognition, such as the way a crowd disperses on a field seen from afar.

Some of these works inhabit a time zone of dematerialized immanence: a portal to an after-image, an aperture through which the observer gazes, or the very observer him-or-herself literally gazing outward through air.

- Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman is an artist living in New York. She recently had a solo exhibition of paintings at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York and a book of her drawings was just published by Gregory R. Miller, NY.