Air Alone (from my dream)

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce Air Alone (from my dream), a two-person show featuring the work of Kim Altomare and Melina Auskaitis. Kim and Melina are two artists that make things. 

Like a thought that snares in one’s mind to come back again and again, when most emerge only to disappear forever, Kim and Melina’s work intersects, snares, and drifts together in the same way the remnants of a shipwreck collect and settle at the bottom of the ocean.

This exhibition is curated by Michelle Anne Harris with assistance from William Schwaller.

The two artists wrangle with material possibilities, using dreams as instruction, engineering the unlikely and the unthought. Secrets are excavated and rehidden. Archetypal yet personal forms hum, thrum and reverberate with memory’s glow.  How messy, awkward, and wise is the natural flow of things.

Kim makes things from paper, pulp paintings and basket woven sculptures, that create a world where collective dreams can take shape. Reed, pulp, and rusted wire become embedded, encased with the detritus of studio and street. Melina, too, secrets things, sandwiching them in garment-shaped layers of fabric, media and discarded paintings. Tapping into histories of teenage girlhood, collecting and compressing them, keeping safe where we first learn of feelings, Melina strums. 

Air alone does not suffice. It envelops thickly, transmitting condensation. Whorls go. We connect body to feeling to sound.

Join us on Saturday May 3 from 5 to 9pm for an opening reception with the artists featuring live performances by Aitis Band and Saggy, starting at 7pm!

There will also be a closing reception on May 31st, 1-4pm in conjunction with Harris’s and Altomare’s Penpals for Palestine! project:

Penpals for Palestine! Presents Pop-Up Postcards: Kim Altomare + Cindy Stockton Moore + Sunny Hsu + Michelle Anne Harris with directive prompts provided by Yaqeen Yamani and Jericho Cinema Club 

1-2 pm  Postcards + Paper Making + Printmaking + Posters

2-4 pm  Eco Wheatpasting