Still Life
Alice Pixley Young

GALLERY III

Alice Pixley Young, Still Life, 2025.

February 14 - March 15, 2026

Opening reception: Saturday, February 14 from 6-8pm

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.

Alice Pixley Young creates multimedia installations that explore the intersections of environmental history, industrial infrastructure, and layered landscapes of memory. Her recent large-scale works have been exhibited by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Taft Museum of Art, and the Sarasota Art Museum. Additional national and international exhibitions include Print Studio London, 21c Museum Hotels, and solo exhibitions at the University of Kentucky and the University of Rochester. In 2026, she will present a major solo exhibition at the Akron Art Museum. Young is the recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Ohio Arts Council, and her work has been featured in publications such as Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artnet News, and New American Paintings. She has recently completed residencies at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California and Two Coats of Paint in Long Island City, New York. Her studio is situated on the Ordovician fossil bed, the unceded Myaamia homelands, near to a nuclear Superfund site in a region commonly known as the Rust Belt.

View Alice Pixley Young’s artist page here.

View the Press Release here.