Autumn Ahn
On the genealogy of forms
March 13th - May 5th, 2024

The work of interdisciplinary sculptor Autumn Ahn is informed by radically expanded notions of performance and landscape. For Ahn, the performative serves as a departure point, at once a system of navigation and a discipline of temporality that guides her engagement with materials such as metal, stone, paper, and light. Through the lens of her practice, mark-making, natural physical processes, the occupying of space by a body, and even objects are seen as events—occurrences that hold, shape, and gather time.

Emerging from an inquiry into body-centered thinking and the overlap between eastern and western conceptual art, Ahn’s practice is continually sensitive to the subtlest of material and perceptual conditions. Rather than completions or stopping points, her works operate as open-ended conceptual meshes—phenomenological arenas that invite co-authorship from external forces such as shifting paths of light, air currents, the pull of gravity, and the transient passage of viewers through space.

resting landscape, 2024. Plywood, pigment, steel.

a score, a landscape, 2024. Steel, paper, river stone, facility steam system

curve, event, 2024. Steel, hi-vis pigment, lighting

two windows, 2024. Steel

fold, 2024. Steel

turnstile, 2024. Steel

The transcript of a talk between Autumn Ahn and Ben Chaffee that took place at lower_cavity on April 21st, 2024 can be found here.

_____________________________________

Autumn Ahn (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose sculptural practice is informed by expanded conceptions of performance, landscape, and time. Emerging from her interest in the areas of overlap between Eastern and Western conceptual practice, Ahn’s installations, sculptures, and drawings function as phenomenological sites shaped by exchanges between materiality, duration, and embodiment. Ahn has exhibited at venues including The Chimney (New York, NY), False Flag Gallery (New York, NY), Ryan Lee Gallery (New York, NY), AIDS Action Committee at Art Basel (Miami, FL), Cinema Tonalá at ArtBO (Bogotá, Columbia), Contemporary Istanbul (Istanbul, Turkey), and Selebe Yoon Gallery (Dakar, Senegal). Her work has been featured by ARTE (FR/DE), the Emergency Index, and Boston Art Review. Ahn is currently a Visiting Artist Fellow at Bard College and was recently a Visiting Fellow to the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. She holds a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.