“With its fluid negotiations between the material and immaterial, Ahn’s work invites viewers to engage in a more embodied form of seeing and sensing. By foregrounding temporality as a condition of perception, her installations push against conventional notions of static or fixed presence, emphasizing the transitory and relational exchanges through which form emerges into being.” — Anthony Discenza (2024)
Ahn’s work explores genealogies of form and meaning across the creation and reinterpretation of sculpture, performance, drawing, and installation. Inspired by the inherently non-linear origins of our becoming, her structures, surfaces, and boundary-defying constructions think through and reimagine broad art historical and philosophical understandings of site, liveness, and nature, while drawing upon traditions of inner navigation such as dreaming, meditation, and automatic writing. Her practice explores the responsive and transient conditions that shape the human experience of reality, investigating how the physical body encounters landscape and the ways that meaning materializes in time and space. She invites interventions from diverse environmental forces such as the wind, gravity, tension, and memory, to her processes, often resulting in forms that exist with varying degrees of duration or sensitivity. Through the exploration of these immediacies of sensory life, she connects to the role of art to reestablish a sense of open-endedness, inviting reflection around the human desire to make sense of existence under the contemporary, untethered sense of time that defines it — liberating the phenomena of landscape from its entanglements with human perception and asking broadly what natural forces might be, or look like.
Autumn Ahn (b.1986, USA) lives and works in rural Western Massachusetts.
Ahn holds an MFA in performance and critical studies, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA in oil painting, from Boston University College of Fine Arts. She is currently a Visiting Artist in Residence in the Visual Arts Department at Bard College, and the recipient of a 2025 CAA Professional Development Award for a Visual Artist, 2025 Martha Boschen Porter Fund Award, 2024 Puffin Foundation Grant and 2024 Mass Cultural Council Creative Individual Award. She has been a resident at Headlands Center for the Arts, a Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard University, and was awarded a 2023 Arts, Science + Collaboration Initiative award to conduct research with Yerkes Observatory and the University of Chicago. Her work has been presented with lower_cavity, False Flag Gallery, Selebe Yoon Gallery, Howard Yezerski Gallery, The Chimney, Cinema Tonalá, Space Debris Istanbul, École du Magasin - Centre National d’Art Contemporain Grenoble, AIDS Action Committee, and others. Her work has been featured by ARTE (FR/DE), the Emergency Index, and Boston Art Review. She is an advisor for the Converging Liberations Residency at MassMoCA and on the board of Boston CyberArts Organization.
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