“Write me letters” you write to me
2024 A.I.R. National Members Exhibition
GALLERY I, II, & III
Cozette Russell, Untitled (summer studio/winter studio) (detail), 2024, Framed archival print, bricks, and twine, 47 x 34 x 6 inches. Edition of 2 + 2 AP.
June 28 – July 28, 2024
Opening reception: Friday, June 28 from 5–7pm
Curated by Nicole Kaack
Nancy Daly, Robin Dintiman, Nicolei Buendia Gupit, Nicole Havekost, Marlana Stoddard Hayes, Olga Hiiva, Gongsan Kim, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Jennifer McCandless, Courtney Desiree Morris, Allison Paschke, Cozette Russell, Carrie Scanga, Martha Sedgwick, Rebecca Weisman, Ellyn Weiss, Holly Wong, Joo Yeon Woo, Alice Pixley Young
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce “Write me letters” you write to me, a group exhibition curated by Nicole Kaack that features work by nineteen A.I.R. National Artist Members: Nancy Daly, Robin Dintiman, Nicolei Buendia Gupit, Nicole Havekost, Marlana Stoddard Hayes, Olga Hiiva, Gongsan Kim, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Jennifer McCandless, Courtney Desiree Morris, Allison Paschke, Cozette Russell, Carrie Scanga, Martha Sedgwick, Rebecca Weisman, Ellyn Weiss, Holly Wong, Joo Yeon Woo, and Alice Pixley Young.
Drawing its title from French playwright Hélène Cixous’s meditation on longing, “Write me letters” you write to me uses the epistolary form as a motif for exploring how artists construct different frameworks for transmission, being, and exchange. In a message to her enigmatic lover Milena, Cixous construes the letter as a screen through which she might grasp at her intractable object of desire, collapsing the expanse between “you” and “I.” And yet, letters also demarcate a physical barrier—they bridge as well as hold apart.
Several of the artists in the exhibition create works that mirror what Kaack calls the letter’s “anticipatory temporality,” or the ways in which the letter writer extrapolates the future of their recipient, looking ahead from a present that is already past, creating a sense of doubling. They mark the passage of time in mediums such as glass, resin, and ink. Other artists use their practice to correspond with a site of diasporic departure, attuning themselves to questions of what it means to be situated and to move toward or away from. Still others capture the letter’s capacity for endurance, creating works that honor the memories of the deceased or suspend moments of ephemeral, corporeal pleasure.
The second half of the exhibition takes its cue from Cixous’s incessant corporeality, her insistence on using the letter to dramatize how bodies interact with one another. Some of the works in the final gallery center the distinction between self and other through an emphasis on the porosity of material, social, and anatomical barriers, while others orient away from how the body is outwardly governed or perceived to prioritize the teeming capacity within its anatomical bounds.
For all of the artists in the exhibition, the semi-permeability of communication is fundamental, the friction against which they work. Bridging distances both physical and psychic, these artists consider latency and longing, ancestral legacies and bodily joys, resilience and interrelation, each one offering diverse perspectives on the failures and triumphs of human connection.
Nicole Kaack is a curator, writer, and archivist. Her writing has been published by Artforum, BOMB, Art In America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Sound American. She has also contributed texts to Life as Activity: David Lamelas (Hirmer Publishers, 2022), Prophetic Kingdom (Daylight Books, 2021), I will set a stage for you (HOLOHOLO, 2019), and Recto / Verso (Hauser & Wirth, 2018), and has edited collections including Twelve Month CRUSH (HESSE FLATOW, 2020). Kaack has organized exhibitions and programs at The Kitchen, Hunter College, A.I.R. Gallery, NARS, Miriam Gallery, HESSE FLATOW, and Small Editions. Kaack is editorial program manager at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and has held positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, and A.I.R. Gallery. She is co-founder of the collaborative artist book project prompt: and small publisher Not Nothing.
View the Press Release here.