The most diaphanous of elements, air skims the edges of a body unseen, unheard, and impossible to grasp, eluding sensory perception and any thought of threat. It reveals itself, but only with distance, as sky. Timothy Morton describes the climate crisis as a hyperobject, something so vast and abstract it overwhelms the mind's ability to process. There is a material problem. Integrating drawing, photography, video and sound, the work included in this exhibition reaches for what is so untouchable. Sky drawn on rock. A blade dragged through the clouds. Wind billowing in and out of a shredded skyscape in fading light at dusk. Coup D’Oeil (Boreas) explores a related process in the video with a sound collaboration by Rebecca Comerford. The video presents a Janus view of wind entering and exiting the frame. Comerford, a mezzo soprano, navigates a single breath through the turbulent atmosphere with moments of almost indistinguishable resonance. Animating sky and body and back again, air shape shifts its way through wild and embodied forms, and roils our ever more deluded construct of nature as other to a human subject.


STEPHANIE WASHBURN is an artist based in Ojai, CA. Her work explores the intersection of abstraction and ecology and our relationship to the physical world. She has participated in exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Taft Botanical Gardens, Praz Delavallade, Mark Moore and ACME galleries. She is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the Agnes Gund Foundation. Reviews include The Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings, Art F City and Vice. Her photographs have been published in Heliotrope, Harper's Magazine, and The LA Review of Books. Washburn received a BA from Wesleyan University, CT and her MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara, CA as a Regents Special Fellow.