Ohan Breiding: Beside the Sun
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Beside the Sun, a solo exhibition by 2024鈥�2025 A.I.R. Fellow Ohan Breiding. Through photography and sculpture, Breiding explores the violence of the photographic medium as a mode of resource extraction. They reanimate Great Depression-era image archives鈥攚ell-known for their socioeconomic resonances鈥攁nd offer a trans/eco/feminist reading that sheds light on the more-than-human lifeforms and landscapes that are fundamental to practices of memory-making.
A large-scale photographic installation encompassing one-hundred hole-punched black-and-white archival images serves as the exhibition鈥檚 entry point. Evoking the style of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, these haunting gelatin silver prints of farm animals and pastoral landscapes are drawn from a 1935 photographic initiative commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document the struggles of agrarian life during and after the Great Depression. Because the 1935 initiative sought to foreground the human hardships of the Great Depression, the images presented here were deemed disposable and extraneous to the original project, denoted by the editor鈥檚 indelible hole-punch, and were never meant to see the light of day. Breiding鈥檚 selection foregrounds another kind of systemic violence, against the animals and the land. As gelatin silver prints, these original images were quite literally made from the lush forms they take as their subjects. Silver salts extracted from the earth are suspended in gelatin from the hooves of farm animals to create the image鈥攅vidence of the violence of the entire photographic endeavor.
On the adjacent wall is a large-scale color photograph, Leakage 1, depicting five pig bladders filled with water. Historically, pig bladders were used as vessels for art and play: in the Middle Ages they were transformed into bagpipes, while the nineteenth century saw them repurposed as football linings or storage bags for oil paints. Rendered in the style of the classical still life, these ominous photographs mimic the memento mori, or reminders of the inevitability of death. By foregrounding the pig bladders as organs rather than resources and resurrecting the 鈥渒illed negatives鈥� of the Farm Security Administration project, Breiding offers the animals and the images that contain them, as well as the field of photography more broadly, an alternate future.
For Breiding, reckoning with death is a political act that opens up boundless possibilities. On the floor between the photographic displays are two large wax sculptures, made by dipping rotary drills, symbols of extractive violence, in beeswax. One stands upright and two lay on the floor, converged, looking like lovers or an altogether new creature. With this gesture, Breiding queers the drill, transforming the hard and the violent into something tactile, spiritual, and warm. Says Breiding: 鈥淭he holes of the 鈥榢illed negatives鈥� are now misplaced suns within a space of dreams, and these sculptures are loving eulogies in object-form of a disappearing landscape.鈥�
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A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Beside the Sun, a solo exhibition by 2024鈥�2025 A.I.R. Fellow Ohan Breiding. Through photography and sculpture, Breiding explores the violence of the photographic medium as a mode of resource extraction. They reanimate Great Depression-era image archives鈥攚ell-known for their socioeconomic resonances鈥攁nd offer a trans/eco/feminist reading that sheds light on the more-than-human lifeforms and landscapes that are fundamental to practices of memory-making.
A large-scale photographic installation encompassing one-hundred hole-punched black-and-white archival images serves as the exhibition鈥檚 entry point. Evoking the style of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, these haunting gelatin silver prints of farm animals and pastoral landscapes are drawn from a 1935 photographic initiative commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document the struggles of agrarian life during and after the Great Depression. Because the 1935 initiative sought to foreground the human hardships of the Great Depression, the images presented here were deemed disposable and extraneous to the original project, denoted by the editor鈥檚 indelible hole-punch, and were never meant to see the light of day. Breiding鈥檚 selection foregrounds another kind of systemic violence, against the animals and the land. As gelatin silver prints, these original images were quite literally made from the lush forms they take as their subjects. Silver salts extracted from the earth are suspended in gelatin from the hooves of farm animals to create the image鈥攅vidence of the violence of the entire photographic endeavor.
On the adjacent wall is a large-scale color photograph, Leakage 1, depicting five pig bladders filled with water. Historically, pig bladders were used as vessels for art and play: in the Middle Ages they were transformed into bagpipes, while the nineteenth century saw them repurposed as football linings or storage bags for oil paints. Rendered in the style of the classical still life, these ominous photographs mimic the memento mori, or reminders of the inevitability of death. By foregrounding the pig bladders as organs rather than resources and resurrecting the 鈥渒illed negatives鈥� of the Farm Security Administration project, Breiding offers the animals and the images that contain them, as well as the field of photography more broadly, an alternate future.
For Breiding, reckoning with death is a political act that opens up boundless possibilities. On the floor between the photographic displays are two large wax sculptures, made by dipping rotary drills, symbols of extractive violence, in beeswax. One stands upright and two lay on the floor, converged, looking like lovers or an altogether new creature. With this gesture, Breiding queers the drill, transforming the hard and the violent into something tactile, spiritual, and warm. Says Breiding: 鈥淭he holes of the 鈥榢illed negatives鈥� are now misplaced suns within a space of dreams, and these sculptures are loving eulogies in object-form of a disappearing landscape.鈥�
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