The Banshees and Their Fairy Friends in the Shadow Forest
Zini Lardieri
GALLERY I
Zini Lardieri, Meeting in the Woods, 2025, video still.
November 22–December 21, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, November 22, from 6–8pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce The Banshees and Their Fairy Friends in the Shadow Forest, an installation of sculptures and projections of their filmed shadows by A.I.R. New York Member Zini Lardieri. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at A.I.R.
The solstice is a threshold. A night of fire, of bodies in shadow, until the balance shifts and days grow. The solstice is also a mirror, showing us how close absence sits to renewal.
Lardieri begins here—at that hinge between dark and the return of light. The Banshees and Their Fairy Friends in the Shadow Forest continues her study of shadow and reflection, where ritual and ruin converge. The banshees and their companions are built from foraged roots and branches sealed in resin, their surfaces catching and scattering light. On mirrored tables, they appear both solid and spectral while filmed projections of their shadows waver on the walls like another form of breathing. The reflections multiply until the room becomes a study in recurrence—light, dark, light again.
At the edge of the installation stand the remains of 40 year old cacti, darkened and pared down. Once pulled loose by the Santa Ana Winds, they rise again—stubborn forms marking where life ended but kept going anyway. Carcasses of carbonized fruit, strewn amongst the banshees continue this theme of loss. A burnt avocado, ordinary and absurd, is held as if it were the fruit of Pompeii, an artifact of southern California carrying both ruin and endurance in its form.
The Shadow Forest also acknowledges that loss may be generative, cathartic, a passage into a new state of being. Lardieri has traditionally participated in a solstice ritual where what one wished to release was written down and then burnt in a collective fire. In the Shadow Forest, the solstice’s fire is transposed into water. Visitors are invited to write what they wish to release on dissolvable paper and drop it into vessels of water etched with the words “All of our Letting Go” and “All of our Calling In.” As the paper fades, the words fragment and drift, surrendering form to the Shadow Forest the way memory does when it’s ready to be forgotten.
From ancient solstice fires to contemporary ritual, destruction has always met renewal in the same gesture: to gather, to hold light against the longest night, to insist on survival.
What began as a private ritual becomes a shared one. Each gesture of release joins another until the act itself becomes communal. The gallery stands as the site where letting go is enacted, where private gestures turn outward.
Paige Greco
Zini Lardieri (b. Newark, NJ) is a multimedia, peripatetic artist who works with installation, reflections, video, photography, and the materials she finds at hand or scavenges in the world at large. Her work is relational, interactive, and often collaborative. She is inspired by people, nature, and by exploring and animating the lost, hidden, marginal, and invisible energies in the world around us. She has an abiding interest in the body and the nature of touch. Her work often explores the body as the vessel through which we experience the world and how class, race, gender, sexuality and politics construct our bodies and affect the way they can move through the world, age and die.
Lardieri has a Master’s degree from NYU and was a participant in the Whitney Museum Independent Studio Program. She is currently a member of A.I.R. Gallery in New York City and has work in the collections of The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (New Haven, NY), the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo and the New York Public Library (NY). Her work has been included in Taschen’s Witchcraft book, and she collaborated with Kay Turner on the book What the Witch’s Nose Knows that Andy Warhol’s Nose Doesn’t Know (2023).
View Zini Lardieri’s page here.
View the Press Release here.
Photography by Matthew Sherman.