AIR ALONE (from my dream)
-Big Ramp Gallery-Philadelphia, PA
2025
Air Alone (from my dream), a two-person show featuring the work of Kim Altomare and Melina Ausikaitis. 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.
My forelock drips, piles up. It’s morning. Something’s in shape, in the air. Thick, with crusted spots. The hoar frost is out. Suffused sap branches under pressure to begin. Inside, we unspool, mute and dumb with unceasing ornamentation. We are squeezed to the point of compaction. Spots, blotches and holes. A blemish really.
We collaborate, pinching sides into pleats, gathering for happenings, books into piles, stinking and sweating, clamping our sentiments down. Secrets must be sublimated after all. We hear the invocation. Scaffolding becomes erect, folding lucidity into line. We’ve built many things before. Debris piles up, the stuff of memory and old clothes press in.
Contaminated by both cloud and milk, the surface of color wavers. Air, alone.
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.
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.
My forelock drips, piles up. It’s morning. Something’s in shape, in the air. Thick, with crusted spots. The hoar frost is out. Suffused sap branches under pressure to begin. Inside, we unspool, mute and dumb with unceasing ornamentation. We are squeezed to the point of compaction. Spots, blotches and holes. A blemish really.
We collaborate, pinching sides into pleats, gathering for happenings, books into piles, stinking and sweating, clamping our sentiments down. Secrets must be sublimated after all. We hear the invocation. Scaffolding becomes erect, folding lucidity into line. We’ve built many things before. Debris piles up, the stuff of memory and old clothes press in.
Contaminated by both cloud and milk, the surface of color wavers. Air, alone.
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.
