“The world is flat” is perhaps humans’ most primitive sense of physical surroundings. It was also a cosmological conclusion drawn from honest bodily perception, because the land beneath our feet is indeed still and level, and the universe unfolds as an infinitely extending plane. This perceptual honesty is where Jong Oh begins.
Alice Pixley Young’s Still Life takes shape in semi-darkness at A.I.R. Gallery as an immersive meditation on ecological time, stratified and shadowed by industrial residue. Installed as a multisensory environment of video projection, sound, industrial scaffolding, and glass bell jars, the installation places viewers in a space where remediation and damage coexist. Suspended from tall black scaffolding, the glass containers move like dimly illuminated pendulums, casting shadows across the walls and establishing the installation’s temporal pulse from the outset.
The work’s rootedness in place is central. Young’s studio is located on an Ordovician fossil bed near a nuclear Superfund site in the Rust Belt. Her exhibition in Brooklyn hints at another Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal, linking two contaminated landscapes across geography. The central video shows horizontal strata in constant motion. Below the upper dusky blue sky, you can travel slowly through narrow moving bands — grasses and wildflowers filmed at the Fernald site in southwest Ohio — creating a lateral sense of passing through a remediated landscape. Alongside it, a thinner strip shows water seen from a bridge, evoking an industrial waterway shaped by contamination and cleanup. The cross sections are clean-cut and suggestive, tinged with a bluish monochrome.
Exhibition view, Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
Birds enter through sound and sight. The birds’ calls, recorded by the artist, continuously shift and reorganize, gradually overtaken by industrial noise. They suggest a tough migration. The suspended glass bell jars are engraved with imagery of Eastern Meadowlarks (one of the bird speciesin population decline). The glass pieces swing slowly like pendulums of grandfather clocks, casting moving bird shadows across the projection, encapsulating past, present, and future. These dome-shaped transparent jars are recognizable as decorative containers used to showcase collected specimens, typically placed on a safe shelf. In Young’s installation, they lose their ground, engraved on, and swing side to side hypnotically. Here, these fragile containers of life also signal warnings, becoming what she calls “active image-makers.” I can imagine those glass jars holding the souls of vanished birds. The birds’ blurred wings flicker as their cries reverberate through the space, at times piercing, at times distant.
Alice Pixley Young, Detail, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
The birds’ imagery appears in motion, blurred and only partially formed, more hinted at than fully seen. The birds seem to move as if traveling between sites, from Young’s Rust Belt landscape toward Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, some vanishing along the way. The black scaffolding structure stands before the screen, geometric, imposing, and bare. It interrupts the projected space, holding the blurred flight behind it in tension with containment. Objects, shadows, and projected imagery fold into one another. The present physical space bleeds into its layered past, reaching toward an unknown future. The disappearing birds, the scientific monitoring of contaminated landscapes, and the broader theme of environmental time link seamlessly. Or as the artist says, the projection reads like a “cross-section connecting atmosphere, land and contaminated infrastructure.”
As projected forms lengthen and shift, they spill beyond the screen and into the room, animating the gallery with a haunting beauty that is eerie, grim, but not yet fatalistic. Still Life does not settle into elegy. It resists the stillness implied by its title. It operates as a poetic wake-up call.
Exhibition view, Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2026, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Photography by Matthew Sherman
Alice Pixley Young: Still Lifeat AIR, 155 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY 11201.On view throughMarch 15, 2026. Wed–Sun, 12–6 pm
About the Writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018, she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. @etty.yaniv
ANISH KAPOOR: MIRROR WORKS EXHIBITION AT LISSON GALLERY 504 West 24th Street, Tue – Sat 10 am to 6 pm
February 11 – April 11, 2026
Anish Kapoor’s exploration of scale, color, volume, and materiality anchors this presentation of mirror works from 2010 to the present. Monumental stainless-steel sculptures and painted mirrors immerse viewers in destabilizing reflective environments shaped by spatial illusion. Highlights include Non Object (Plane) (2010), a folded steel form that blurs object and reflection; Double Vertigo (2012), whose concave surfaces disorient perception; Untitled (2023), structured around a reflective void; and Stave (Red) (2015), where lacquered color intensifies spatial presence. Wall-mounted mirror sculptures further collapse boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. The exhibition follows Kapoor’s Jewish Museum show and coincides with his SCAD Museum of Art presentation.
Rebecca Rutstein at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Photograph courtesy of the artist
As the Philadelphia gallery season ramps up, we explore unseen worlds in three very distinct shows. If you are a science or color enthusiast, be sure to see Rebecca Rutstein’s large abstract paintings at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. She uses bold designs and bright colors to tap into the sublime, examining hidden ecosystems fundamental to life on Earth. Delving into the veiled depths of the subconscious, Elena Drozdova’s Riding Fear at PII Galley presents dream-like paintings with powerful symbolic imagery. Across town at InLiquid Gallery, Brotherly Lens: A Portrait of Philadelphia places three exceptional photographers in conversation, inspiring introspection and creating a striking narrative of Philadelphia’s unknown history and communities.
The impetus for this series of conversations between a visual artist and a choreographer comes directly from my recent collaborative work with a choreographer as part of Norte Maar’s CounterPointe10. In this unique project a choreographer is paired with a visual artist to create together over two months a dance performance that integrates the two disciplines into a cohesive vision. Here is the conversation between artist Alejandra Seeber and choreographer Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon.
The curatorial team held a fascination with exploring and activating the ceiling, corners, and floors of Equity Gallery via the works that comprise Making Sense Without Consensus. Here are 2 examples of this; on the left, Linda King Ferguson’s work stretching downward to the floor; and on the right, Diogo Pimentão’s work installed to live and extend around the corner of a gallery wall.
Now on view at Equity Gallery in the Lower East Side is a notable group exhibition, cogently titled Making Sense Without Consensus, with works by 14 remarkable artists and 3 astute curators at the helm. The exhibition statement says that these artists explore reality through fragmented connections and geometric materiality, “investigating whether the linearity of time is real or if past and future overlap.” In further absorbing what this exhibition might represent, I also want to offer an illuminating quote from The Radicant (2009), an essay by celebrated curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. This thought piece provides context for the development of Making Sense Without Consensus:
“In ordinary language, ‘modernizing’ has come to mean reducing cultural and social reality to Western formats. And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own problematics: an alter modernity …”
Deborak Kruger in front of Accidentals, 2020, screen-printing on recycled plastic bags, sewing, wrapping, waxed linen thread, 92 x 167 x 6″
Plumas, featuring Deborah Kruger’s recent work, is PRPG.mx’s premiere show in their newly expanded exhibition and residency space in Mexico City. In this sculptural installation, curated by Micheal Swank, Kruger focuses on the extinction of Mexican bird species, the death of Mexican indigenous languages, and the impacts of climate change on migration.
Bianca Severijns is a Dutch born artist who lives in Israel. Her sculptural installation range from wearable sculpture to wall relief made of paper. Through an elaborate process she utilizes this medium with remarkable skills to create simultaneously playful and thought provoking sculptures which evoke reflections on displacement, the meaning of a safe home, and coping mechanisms. For instance, her Blanket sculpture which is currently showing at the recently opened TLV Biennial 2020 particularly resonates with the angst during the pandemic. Since we have finalized the interview process before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we have recently re-visited our last question in order to bring her responses up to date.
