A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Still life, an exhibition of new work by Alum Member Alice Pixley Young.

Installed as a multisensory environment of moving shadows, scaffolding, birdsong, and video projection, Still life offers a stark meditation on the realities of ecologically remediated landscapes. Young links her local superfund site, where nuclear waste lies buried beneath the surface, and Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal: a waterway historically engineered and polluted and now technologically “restored.” Young’s investigations reveal that environmental precarity operates at timescales beyond the human, framing remediation as an unstable condition. The work questions the idea of repair: what is restored, and what remains permanently changed or erased in the process?

Since the 1970s, an estimated three billion birds have vanished across the United States and Canada. Still life acknowledges this disappearance, registering catastrophic loss while simultaneously attuning viewers to small but significant strategies of resilience emerging amid environmental decline.

Young’s installation renders visible the long shadows of industrial history and the fragile ecosystems we now inhabit. The exhibition invites a form of focused attention—a still life not fixed in time, but continually unfolding under the persistent pressures of past decisions and uncertain futures.

(Still life is generously supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts)