etheReality

from breath to air, and back

June 21 - August 31, 2025
Free & Open to the public
Saturdays & Sundays 1:00 - 5:00 pm
& by appointment

Opening Reception
Saturday June 28, 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Extended hours for Upstate Art Weekend
Thursday July 17 - Monday July 21, 12:00 - 5:00 pm

The exhibition is curated by Alison McNulty and includes works by:

Bel Falleiros
Ghost of a Dream
Sanie Irsay
Mollie McKinley
Jason Mitcham
Megan Pahmier
Linda Stillman
Amy Talluto

etheReality: from breath to air, and back is a group exhibition of works across various media that consider the cyclical, interconnected and often intangible relationship between individuals and the collective. The show attempts to locate our contemporary human reality in the murky, haunted spaces between our cumulative acts of destruction and a shared atmosphere of grief and loss, while offering glimpses of inspiration in connection to each other and the natural world. How is breath tied to time and place? How do our everyday actions and habits co-create a vast cosmic phenomenon that echoes through the ether and implicates us in its return?

Programming at Ann Street Gallery:

August 16, 2:00 - 3:30pm
One only Earth, One only Sky
Workshop with Bel Falleiros
Details here.
RSVP required to annstreetgallery@safe-harbors.org

August 23, 2:00 - 3:30pm

Artist Dialogs:
Jason Mitcham and
Ghost of a Dream, moderated by Alison McNulty
Details here.

August 30, 2:00 - 3:30pm

Artist Panel:
Round Robin Q&A between Mollie McKinley, Linda Stillman, Amy Talluto, and curator Alison McNulty

Details here.

Exhibition Materials:

Exhibition Checklist
^{(Price list available upon request)}

Press:

Hyperallergic
10 Shows to See in Upstate New York This August
(Download PDF here)

Two Coats of Paint
Hudson Valley (+vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: July 2025

Times Union
What to see during Upstate Art Weekend
(Download PDF here)

Bel Falleiros

^{belfalleiros.com.br}

^{@bel.falleiros}

My artistic practice is driven by the ideas of place and belonging, in understanding how contemporary constructed landscapes (mis)represent the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place. What lies underneath the layers of concrete and everyday rubble? I learned from my hometown (São Paulo, Brazil) that colonization, displacement, and consequent historical amnesia can create deep scars in the land and for those who inhabit it. What narratives go missing? I work to recall these stories and their imagery in drawings, photos, sculptures, installations, and site-specific works.

While working across diverse social, natural, and historical landscapes, I've accumulated experiences that are reminders that every place, person and matter is an integral piece of its ecosystem. Over time, my work has embraced the scale of the landscape to create welcoming and immersive spaces for reconnection: with nature, with our inner self and with the other beings around us. These temporary sacred spaces are an invitation to be closer to the land and to remind of the innate knowledge of our bodies, and of our interconnectedness—an urgent call for our unrooted times.  

Ghost of a Dream

^{ghostofadream.com}

^{@ghostofadreamart}

Our work explores the hopes and dreams of people, using the ephemera left behind in their pursuit of these aspirations. When our collaboration began in 2008, we examined the universal dreams of love and wealth, constructing objects of desire—dream homes, cars, and more—using remnants from gambling, such as scratch tickets, casino playing cards, and carpet from casinos.

Over time, our focus has shifted toward the collective dream of a better future: one free from the devastating impacts of climate change, and a society that values social justice and political freedom. Each project begins with ephemera we gather—images, posters, videos, and other materials—which we layer, collage, and transform into visual narratives.

Our current series, If this is paradise, confronts the escalating frequency of climate disasters. By sourcing imagery from thousands of news stories, we highlight recognizable causes and effects of climate change, including deforestation, melting polar ice, forest fires, mining, political unrest, and floods. These composite photographs are created by layering sometimes up to 70 individual images, offering viewers a cumulative perspective on the global crisis.

Through this work, we aim to challenge the way we relate to the constant stream of climate imagery in the media, hoping the repetitive visualization of global disasters will inspire meaningful action toward a sustainable future.

In a time of travel bans, persecution, climate disaster, and global pandemics, we are working on a project that brings hope into a collective experience. Our video and installation based project Aligned by the Sun, seeks to unify our fractured planet. We are collaborating with artists from each of the 192 UN member states, as well non UN member nations and territories in the world by asking them to capture a short video of the sun. Then we have taken those clips to make large installations, video collages, and still image composites.

This work is intended to spark a dialogue about equality, location, migration, and the environment.

Across history, humans have drawn and redrawn lines on this earth. As borders have shifted, one truth has remained constant: we inhabit a single planet that is sustained by the light and warmth of the sun. Aligned by the Sun invites viewers to imagine a future charted by this fact.

Sanie Irsay

^{sanieirsay.com}

^@sanieirsay

Air Space Parcel above Agnietenplaats 2, 6822 JD, Arnhem, Netherlands, purchased on October 17, 2024. The parcel has a footprint of 314m2. Its horizontal boundaries are coextensive with the boundaries of the building. It starts at the height of 0m above the roof surface, and extends upward to a height of 150m.  

Mollie McKinley

^{molliemckinley.com}

^{@mollie_mckinley}

My sculptures work with the elementals: water, erosions of earth, material formed by fire, and the ephemerality of air. These elements function as tools, materials, and subjects of the work; they are my collaborators. Carved salt blocks and blown glass access the myths and intelligences of the elementals. This work approaches the unknown as an adored friend, honoring both the ethereal and the tangible. While the series began as experiments about time and erosion during my recovery from cancer, it has evolved to integrate ongoing questions around death, embodiment, and the unseen.

In the tradition of hermetic alchemy, salt represents the body in relationship to its spirit. The sculptures begin by using water-jet carving techniques to erode blocks of salt. These worn salt-bodies are then paired with blown glass, with breath-inflated glass orbs hovering atop. Sometimes illuminated neon is bent and threaded through holes in the salt. Since glass does not fuse to most materials, these are separate material components that use gravity and balance to stabilize into one sculpture. They are simultaneously precarious and enmeshed.

Eleven years after my very first salt sculptures, the Tír na nÓg iteration of my salt and glass series began in 2023. Tír na nÓg looks deeper into mythologies of death and afterlife, positioning the sculptures as elemental portals to the otherworld. Their color palette of muted beige, purple-blacks, and yellows all shift in hue based on the intensity of light shining through them. Many have high silver content in the chemical composition, allowing for greater transformations in their appearance. This shift allows the sculptures to vacillate as dynamic objects with life and agency.

Tír na nÓg is the ancient Celtic underworld/otherworld. Pre-dating the notion of underworld-as-hell, the pre-Christian Celts envisioned the spirit plane as an idealized form of earth. Here, supernatural beings co-exist with the spirits of the dead; possibly with elementals and fae creatures. While each geographic region had variations on who occupied this realm and how to enter into it, the entrances to the underworld were always found on the ground itself, rather than the sky. Swamps, bogs, wells, burial mounds, and a sudden fog or mist could all be temporary doorways to this dimension (although living humans were not encouraged to seek access before their death). Everyone ended up in Tír na nÓg eventually. A universal, paradisal afterlife was connected to the mushy bits of earth itself, rather than above and away in the sky. Our feet, our bodies, are always touching the doorways to the beyond.

Jason Mitcham

^{jasonmitcham.com}

^{@jason_mitcham}

Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in painting and stop-motion animation, my work explores mapping, land use and planning, cycles of growth and decay, layering of history, and the complex web of social, political and environmental forces embedded in the landscape. Both my research and practice are heavily influenced by my history as a land surveyor.

Using a stop-motion process my animations are created by hundreds or thousands of successive alterations on paintings. Within the animating process marks are no longer made with the ultimate, final state of the image taking precedence. Rather, every mark creates the animation, so only the next movement matters. No ideal form is thought of. Rather than transcendency, contingency is paramount. A mark’s purpose is to bridge the one before it and the one that will follow it. More than likely it will be overlaid later on, by other marks needed to tell another part of the story.

As the animations develop, the paintings become topographic “terrains” of built-up layers. In the end they stand as archaeological remnants of the process.

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise was created through a stop-motion process of documenting the development of a single painting. Slight alterations were photographed throughout the painting process, and then are shown in sequential order. Each second of moving image contains approximately 10 alterations on the painting. The animation also serves as the music video for the title song, written and performed by the Avett Brothers.

Pumpjacks on Horizon is an animated painting created as part of the three-channel immersive video installation, Pumpjack. The animations for Pumpjack were created over the course of a year, and began with a simple investigation: animate a lone oil pump in a field as a point of departure. A cycle, a pump, a pulse, and a referent to the oil that powers what has shaped the design of our modern landscape and its infrastructure – the automobile.

Before sound and editing began, the artist’s father died unexpectedly following a heart attack. This event profoundly shaped the final form of the work, which draws a connection between exterior and interior, between infrastructure and the human vascular system, between blood and oil, between a heart and a pumpjack. Placed in an immersive three channel environment, the work creates a heightened corporeal awareness for the viewer. The individual viewer’s body thus becomes a point of departure, both inward and outward as they experience vastly changing scales of systems. Designed as a never-ending loop, the work raises questions about sustainability, cycles of development and ruin, and our roles within larger systems.

Site/Sight #1 is a painting from an ongoing series of works that combine observational landscape painting with survey mapping imagery.

Survey Tape on Power Lines is an animated painting that will serve as a scene in the artist’s current in-progress animation, Ever Behind the Sunset.  

Megan Pahmier

^{meganpahmier.com}

^{@meganpahmier}

My art activates the unseen. I think of the objects I make as three-dimensional drawings, which emerge and recede in space through techniques of camouflage, illusion, and manipulations of scale. Through these object-drawings, I seek to reveal the instability of perception and how varying modes of attention and awareness shape our experience of reality. I wonder: How do we attend to or conceive of the spaces we inhabit? Within a world of networked technologies, what does it mean to be “touched by” something. I make sculptures that explore how objects and experiences “speak” in ways images cannot. I am interested in the psychology of space, the complex network of relationships between objects and their surrounding environment. My work seeks to address aspects of these encounters that are difficult to represent or capture: vibrations, forces, energies.

Constructed from repeated half-moon sections of individually cut porcelain and joined with cotton twill tape, as above, so below creates an undulating form that embodies the hermetic principle "as above, so below." The object shifts between multiple interpretations—serpent, vertebral column, topographical map, captured fog, or breath—with each reading dependent on the viewer's perspective and frame of reference.

In the piece rings of fire, tufts of cotton, barely one inch tall, rise like flames from the ground, forming two interlocking circles. Where a cotton ball has been pressed into glue and pulled away, traces remain, a residue that maps moments of contact and release. Through this work, I render visible the “negative” space of sculpture and work to highlight the physicality of that space through something that is barely there.  

Linda Stillman

^{lindastillman.com}

^{@linda_stillman}

I collaborate with nature and work with what nature provides — leaves for collage material, flowers for pigment stains, the sky for inspiration — to preserve moments in time.

In my Daily Skies project, I document a small section of the sky each day in an ongoing series, started in August 2005, and continuing indefinitely. Each year I make and present the sky images in different media and formats. In 2011 I painted the sky on a small panel each morning when the light was best from my windows I later mounted the paintings by month on panels in the format of the calendar.

In subsequent years I made works on paper, then I turned to photography. For the last few years, I have also been posting the daily photographs on dedicated Instagram accounts. This year I take photos of the sky each day, draw a white circle on them and post them on Instagram. Later I turn selected ones into paintings.

Like my parents before me, I subscribe to and read the New York Times for most of my adult life. Reading the paper was a key part of my morning ritual. Many years ago, as a way to indicate to my husband that I’d read the paper so it could be thrown out, I started tearing off the upper right hand corner. Realizing this fragment contained the all important weather forecast, I started saving the corners (called “ears”) and have been making artwork out of them. These corners are meaningful to me as the weather greatly affects my moods and often impact my life more than the headlines. These works reflect my interest in memorializing the everyday and drawing attention to the natural world.

Whether Weather is a swirling collage of a month's worth of corners from the New York Times.

Ears to the Sky/Ozone Hole is made from a print of a collage of corners from the New York Times, formed into a circle in which one catches a glimpse of the blue of the sky. It is how I picture an ozone hole, the thinning of ozone in the sky.

Amy Talluto

^{amytalluto.com}

^@talluts

My paintings lie at the intersection of four personal symbols. The first is a transcription of the sitter's eyes in a famous portrait by Ingres (Joséphine-Éléonore-Marie- Pauline de Galard de Brassac de Béarn, Princesse de Broglie) that have a striking resemblance to my mother’s eyes. Second is a bending and contorting figure sometimes called a "blockhead," other times called a "starchild" that was birthed from a collage fragment. And third is a smooth-trunked tree with a singular knot that functions like an observer or Greek chorus when multiplied. The final fourth symbol is a type of a Victorian pottery called a "spill vase" which is a tubular mantelpiece made by Staffordshire and used to hold slivers of wood, "spills," to light candles before matches were invented.

I mix and mingle these four symbols into imaginary environments in my paintings, drawings and sculptures. In a surrealist way, these symbols combine to create new meaning out of unexpected configurations. Floating disembodied in atmosphere, stacking one atop another like a ribcage, observing other character's actions, or drifting into deep water, my compositions become flights of fancy that act out loose narratives of memory, recognition and loss.

Repetition, like in a game of Telephone, whispers infinite permutations into each instance as it morphs and evolves with each work.  

Safe Harbors' Ann Street Gallery programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and with funding from the Cowles Charitable Trust, Dominican Sisters of Hope, M&T Charitable Foundation, and TD Charitable Foundation.