Atlas of Air  2020-2025

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Atlas of Air is a practice I began as a way of keeping records during the pandemic. I cut and collected the "empty" spaces,  from front-page photographs in The New York Times. These fragments are mostly nondescript background skies in visually charged images of drought, fire, war, or the effects of the pandemic.

 

Each fragment is printed on rice paper from the digital edition of the Times, then collaged into new arrangements.

The air around us, between us, and above our heads usually goes unnoticed unless clouds appear, or an especially blue sky or a beautiful sunset. It becomes a kind of blank, a terra incognita.

 

What is there to see in these cut-up fragments? Are they photographic indexes of something, or of nothing? I think of these overlooked spaces as material evidence of the atmosphere we move through while history unfolds around us.

 

​​Exhibited: Because the Sky Is Blue, curated by Grant Wahlquist, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland ME, 2026–27; flicker / reform / dissolve, Ulterior Gallery, New York, 2025. ​See also: "Atlas of Air," in Post Pandemic Imaginaries, eds. Les Roberts and Alyssa Grossman, Bloomsbury, London, in press.