I woke up dreaming.
16th A.I.R. Biennial

GALLERY I & II

January 11 – February 9, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, January 11, from 6–8pm

AG, Santina Amato, Soeun Bae, Emilie Baltz (and) Klasien van de Zandschulp, effie bowen, Cynthia Cruz, Kayla Delacerda, Vivienne Dick, Orlando Estrada, Yessica Gispert, Katya Grokhovsky, H.A. Halpert, Harmony Honig, Miranda July, LIZ’N’BOW, Susan Rostow, Jocelyn Tsui

Curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce its 16th Biennial, I woke up dreaming., curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández. Beginning with the democratic exercise of an open call, the exhibition asks artists to reflect on the nebulous boundary between performance and daily life in the hallucinatory media landscape that defines our present moment.

Borrowing its title from a 1978 song by Lydia Lunch’s band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, I woke up dreaming. uses the dream state as a metaphor for exploring the disorientation many of us feel as we find ourselves caught between digital entanglements and analogue experiences, between moments of authentic connection and curated self-presentation. Each artist in the exhibition engages with dreaming—not necessarily as a literal act, but as a process of envisioning, questioning, and reshaping reality. The familiar becomes unsettling, the mundane is illuminated with strange light, and the boundaries of possibility are stretched. To dream is to experience emotions in their most exaggerated and raw forms. The works on view reflect this emotional landscape, invoking a sense of the weird, the eerie, and the unexpectedly sublime. 

The exhibition brings together works by seventeen artists working across a diverse array of mediums, including video, sculpture, performance, painting, and printmaking. Installed alongside works solicited from the open call process are two archival films by Vivienne Dick and Miranda July, which serve as a sort of spectral interlocutor for the exhibition’s more contemporary moments. For each artist in I woke up dreaming., the dream state is a liminal space where conventional binaries—between natural and artificial intelligence, humanity and its environment, past and present, or margin and periphery—can be called into question. Through dreams, they probe how bodies have been mechanized and upturn the disciplinary structures that enforce control in our waking lives. They embrace the absurdity of the everyday, exult in failure, and reconfigure despair into hope, mirroring the regenerative arc of a dream that first unsettles, and then heals. 

I woke up dreaming. asks viewers to embrace the dream’s contradictions: its capacity for joy and terror, peace and chaos, fantasy and truth. In a world that often demands clarity and resolution, this exhibition celebrates the ambiguity and richness of dreaming, where the impossible becomes not just imaginable, but inevitable.

This exhibition is made possible by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Patricia Margarita Hernández  is a curator and researcher with a background in care work. Her practice, which is often grounded in collaboration, focuses on the intersections of ecology, climate change, and feminist decolonial theory. Currently, she is the Associate Curator at Amant, Brooklyn, NY. She has held positions as Assistant Curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York, NY and Associate Director at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, the first artist-run collective in the United States dedicated to feminist practices. Collaborative projects include Alliance of the Southern Triangle (A.S.T.), a platform for artists and architects focused on speculative urbanism and climate change. She has organized exhibitions, public programs, and projects at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; P!, New York, NY; and the Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; among others; and online as part of Strelka Magazine and Institute, Moscow, RUS; SFMOMA's Open Space, San Francisco, CA; Art Papers, Atlanta, GA; and The Miami Rail. Hernández holds a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

AG (Miami, FL, 1986) explores the transformative power of performance and self-expression, blending cinematic performance, live exploration, and behind-the-scenes production to challenge traditional notions of identity, visibility, and myths of greatness. By merging the private and public dynamics of creation, AG investigates the edges of transformation—personal, cultural, and collective—crafting moments where entertainment becomes a process of self-reflection and reimagination. AG’s philosophical text-based works are archived in the Centre Pompidou’s Bibliotèque Kandinsky and the Museum of Modern Art.

Santina Amato holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum, Springbreak, Here Arts Center, Samek Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, and MoCA Tucson. She has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Amato has held artist residencies at 1708 Gallery, MASS MoCA, and MoCA Tucson, among others, and was named a Hot Pick Artist by Smack Mellon in 2018. Her work is part of the Joan Flasch Artist's Book Collection and the Samek Art Museum.

Soeun Bae was born in South Korea, raised in Alabama, and is now based in New York. Bae works with sculpture, technology, and performance to question what it is to be living inside of a body. She participated in Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project, and completed residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (CO) and NARS Foundation (NY), and Velvetpark Media (NY). Bae completed her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. 

Emilie Baltz is a New York based experiential artist & designer who creates multi-sensory work that reconnects self and society to the wonder of the human body. She uses the five senses to tell stories that deepen connection through embodiment and plays with how the design of sensory experience affects human perception and behavior. 

Klasien van de Zandschulp is an Amsterdam-based interactive artist and the creative director at studio affect lab. Critically acclaimed for her story-driven and participatory experiences, Klasien explores sensory design, embodiment, rituals, augmented realities, human interaction, and (radical) thoughts around our daily technology consumption. 

effie bowen is an artist from Western North Carolina, based in New York since 2010. Emerging from a background as a professional performer, their recent work crossfades material exploration and embodiment practice in order to disrupt routine objects. Their work has been supported by shows and residencies in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. effie has a BFA in Dance from Hollins University and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Cynthia Cruz, a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist, holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2014). Her practice spans painting, drawing, video, AI and digital art, crafting fictional worlds inspired by animism, folklore, and science fiction. Her work explores play, intuition, and the subconscious. She works with AI to create reactionary artworks. Solo exhibitions include Relic (2024) at [NAME] Publications, funded by Knight Foundation (New Work Award 2022), and Slug and Slag (2023) at [NAME] Publications, both in Miami, FL. Cruz won the Acme Goldsmiths MFA Studio Award (2014) and was nominated for the Knight Arts and Tech Fellowship (2023).

Kayla Delacerda, a multidisciplinary artist, was born and raised in Miami, Florida, where she continues to live and work. She earned her BFA from New World School of the Arts in 2015. From 2015 to 2020, Delacerda led the social practice art collective Midnight Thrift. Her solo exhibitions include Acceptance (2023) at [NAME] Publications in Miami, Florida, and Down On Paper (2024) at Touché Boutique, an exhibition space within Tunnel Projects in Miami.

Vivienne Dick is an Irish feminist experimental and documentary filmmaker. Her early films helped define the No Wave scene. According to The Irish Times, “one of the most important film-makers Ireland has produced.” Dick was born in Donegal and grew up in Ireland during the 1950s, attending University College there in the 1960s. She emigrated to the United States in the 1970s. Upon her arrival in the U.S., Dick became an integral figure in No Wave film culture and produced a series of seminal Super8 short films. Living in New York, which was undergoing a recession and an inexpensive place to live, many of her films were staged around well-known sites such as Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the World Trade Center. The films featured punk performers such as Lydia Lunch, Pat Place (of the band Bush Tetras) and Adele Bertei (of The Contortions). Film critic and author J. Hoberman has called Dick the “quintessential No Wave filmmaker.”

Orlando Estrada is an interdisciplinary artist based between Miami, FL and Brooklyn, NY. Spanning sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and installation, his work often engages with concepts of post naturalism, identity, and the human condition. Having spent his childhood in the otherworldly setting of a military base on the coastal cliffs of Western Puerto Rico, Estrada’s move to Miami during his teens ignited a fascination with the relationship between humans and the natural world. This connection serves as a foundational inspiration for his ongoing series of assemblage sculptures which depict narrative scenes and philosophical vignettes set within dreamlike terrain. Seamlessly blending natural and synthetic materials, Estrada’s works both reconcile the human versus nature binary and engage gothic tropes as a lens for analyzing the diasporic experience.

Jessica (Yessica) Gispert is a multidisciplinary artist from Miami, FL, exploring Caribbean identity, mythology, and mysticism in her work. She layers personal and collective histories to investigate the boundaries between reality and the unseen. Gispert holds an MFA from NYU Steinhardt (2012) and a postgraduate degree from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (2021). Currently, she is a Visiting Associate Professor in Photography at Florida International University. Her work has been exhibited globally, including at Museum Abteiberg in Germany, MoMA PS1 in New York City, and Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami. Gispert has received numerous awards, including Miami Individual Artist Grants, an Ellies Creator Award, the Coral & Cathers Award, and a Miami-Dade Art in Public Places commission.

Katya Grokhovsky is a Ukrainian born, NYC based artist, educator, and a Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Grokhovsky holds an MFA from School of The Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts, and a BA in Fashion from RMIT. Grokhovsky is a recipient of numerous residencies, including Padnos Distinguished AIR at GVSU, The California Studio: Manetti Shrem AIR at UC Davis, EFA Studio Program, SVA Art Practice AIR, MAD Museum AIR, BRICworkspace, Watermill Center, and more. She is an awardee of Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, FST StudioProjects Fund, New American Fellowship, and others. 

H.A. Halpert is an artist whose work concerns doubles, translations, and accidents that aren’t. She makes sculpture, drawings, and encyclopedic accounts of subjective facts. She was born in Newfoundland, Canada and lives in New York City. 

Harmony Honig is a queer, disabled Jewish Brazilian-American writer, director, and interdisciplinary performance artist snow-birding between Miami, FL and Brooklyn, NY.  Through a practice of theater-making that incorporates drag, somatics, and field recordings, their work explores bodily failure as a pathway to liberation, communal care, and self-actualization. Honig is a co-conspirator of the Miami Artist Census, former resident of Bakehouse Art Complex, and an alum of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. They have exhibited their work at Creative Time Summit, Mana Contemporary, and O, Miami Festival. Honig received their BFA in Theater from New World School of the Arts in 2009.

Miranda July was born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. July studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before leaving the university to pursue filmmaking. The artist works across media in her practice, from staged performances and feature films to impromptu dance and short videos posted on social media, from novels and short-story collections to sculptural installations at the Venice Biennale. In each of these varied media, July examines different models and modes of connecting with people, from close friends and family to total strangers, and shows audiences how these connections might transform our lives and the world around us.

LIZ’N’BOW’s work has been featured internationally, including: Locust Projects, MOCA North Miami, Young at Art Museum, David Castillo, Mana Contemporary, Squeaky Wheel, ICA Miami, Wassaic Projects, Palacio de Bellas Arte, and Museum of Modern Art Santo Domingo. LIZ’N’BOW are recipients of Creative Capital Wild Futures, NEFA Development & Touring Grant, Knights Art Challenge from the Knight Foundation, Franklin Furnace, PAM CUT Labs Fellowship, WaveMaker, Oolite Arts Ellies Award, LMCC Creative Engagement, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Sundance Short Film Intensive Fellow. LIZ’N’BOW have been awarded residencies and fellowships at MacDowell, Headlands, Ucross, Elizabeth Murray, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Caldera Arts, Squeaky Wheel, Mana Contemporary, Tempus Projects, ACRE, La Sierra de Santa Marta, Cannonball and more.

Susan Rostow (b. 1953, Brooklyn, NY) is a Brooklyn based multi-media artist. Her work resembles abstracted biomorphic human figures and imagined archaeological artifacts. She is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking / Book Arts, and has participated in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, Peru, Korea, and Japan. Her works are in the collections of the Library of Congress National Print Archives, Washington, D.C. and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Jocelyn Tsui is an artist born and raised in Hong Kong, where she considers the overwhelming density of moving “body-to-body,” a direct influence to her obsession for control in her printmaking practice. Through architecture, mathematics, and cartographic planning, she embodies “the grid” as a structural foundation. However, it is through the expansion of print into installation that her work evolves into riddle-like abstractions that reveal the disruptive possibilities of “the grid.” Overall, Tsui’s work aims to recognize manmade structures of organization but simultaneously the world’s natural affinity for disorder, and thereby encompass the messy beauty of humanness of it all.

View the Press Release here.