All that is solid melts into air is a group exhibition featuring the works of recent alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Artists featured are Jean Alexander Frater, Soowhan Choi, Brendan Codey, Seth Hunter, David Prince, Kit Rosenberg and Elizabeth Tyson. The show is organized by curator EC Balazs and designed by Chicago- based exhibition designer Bryan Metzdorf.

The title, All That is solid melts into air is from Karl Marx. It captures the essence of the exhibition theme – the impossibility of capturing human experience – and was selected for its deep emotional and spiritual resonances. Gathered together by Marx’s quote, the works explore capturing, containing, expressing or reflecting on the deep and everyday experiences of life. Works include sculpture, video tracking, installation, photography and mixed media. The works presented offer a range of approaches on the subject from the material to the ethereal.

Kit Rosenberg’s portraits are made of the remnants of human experience literally-using dust, and sometimes hair from his subjects home to create their portraits. Dust is almost 90% human skin. Elizabeth Tyson’s found slides of a family holiday together with a compelling text which can be read in the reflected light of the slides, provide a meditation on memory and lived experience. David Prince celebrates his friends’ presence in his life and in each other’s lives, expressing the community they share in a video installation featuring four clothes dryers at a Laundromat. In these three artists’ works the human subjects have left behind only traces, yet their presence is clearly tangible, more clearly captured in the imprint of their absence.

In the final four artists’ works, the bodily evidence disintegrates into light – Brendan Codey’s inexpressibly beautiful, abstracted grids mark a terrible, indelible moment in which so many lives ended. Seth Hunter engages us, the viewer, in his meditation, via a video tracking process, requiring our presence and willingness to be still and to hold in the present moment in order to register and leave our mark, in a palimpsest of light. Jean Frater’s photo installation compels us via its simple powerful geometries and subject into a meditative state, gazing into a distant horizon, somehow displaced. Soowhan Choi’s work is created of thousand of pinpricks creates a leaf, or perhaps, it is a feather. We see the object reflected in a dark pool of water, and peer into what seems an immeasurable depth. This work thus completes the cycle, asking us to meditate on the perception of life and how we construct meaning and experiences.