autumn ahn
artworks
exhibitions
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This body of work is a continuation of my interest in the responsive conditions that construct reality within the human experience. Upon relocating nearly a decade ago to a rural landscape in Western Massachusetts, my understanding of the interdisciplinary drive in my work expanded in response to embodied rhythms of time that I found in the natural world. Thinking about landscape, death, and unpredictability, I work primarily with notions of drawing, sculpture, and performance to intervene and reveal these unfixed conditions of material life.
My research investigates practical forms, structures, and systems that organize human interactions with nature, such as windows, clocks, maps, astronomy, dreaming rituals, landscaping, and more. I am interested in the role of art to reestablish a sense of open-endedness to meaning and the structures we live with through the abstraction of familiar forms and processes that are accompanied by the symbolic or emotional charge of time. Experimenting with unconventional strategies through sculptural construction and representation, I include temporality in the production of my work, often resulting in objects and installations that exist in varying degrees of duration or sensitivity. My artworks transpire and collapse with the wind, move with the sun, hang from one another, or are shaken by a vibrational response to the environment.
Inspired by the inherently non-linear origins of our becoming, my approach explores genealogies of form and meaning across the reinterpretation of diverse art historical and philosophical understandings of site, structure, liveness, and nature. Through the exploration of these immediacies of sensory life, I connect with 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 conditions of time that define it — attempting to liberate the phenomena of landscape from its entanglements with human perception and asking instead 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.
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studio: Berkshires, MA