The Invisible Hand
Sky Syzygy
GALLERY III
Sky Syzygy, Still from The Invisible Hand, 2021, Single channel digital video, 46 minutes.
August 6 — September 5, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday, August 6, 12-6pm (by appointment)
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce The Invisible Hand, a new film and installation by 2020-2021 A.I.R. Fellow Sky Syzygy. Syzygy’s wide-ranging practice brings together film, installation, and performance to reveal and resist the micropolitics of organizational culture, focusing on lives and experiences that are customarily relegated to the background. The Invisible Hand (2021) is an experimental documentary that foregrounds the usually invisible labor of a government building’s cleaning crew. The film follows the cleaners of the Gouvernement aan de Maas in Maastricht, Netherlands, the site of the treaty that established the European Union in 1992. Created improvisationally and in collaboration with several of the cleaners—Abdul, Esther, Irene, Josje, Kiona, Peter, and Velasca—the film captures their daily routines as they polish the building’s marble and glass surfaces and tidy up after politicians and office staff. This will be Syzygy’s first solo exhibition.
The film is an intimate portrait of the cleaning crew and a journey through the epic landscape of the building itself. The camera never leaves the Gouvernement, following the cleaners’ often solitary labor and documenting their brief encounters with one another and with other building staff. While Syzygy’s camera maintains an observational distance, its presence is a frequent topic of conversation by the cleaners and staff, dialogue that reveals power dynamics and hierarchies at play within the building. At other times, the camera takes the vantage point of the cleaning machinery itself, floating just above its gleaming floors or bouncing down its corridors.
At A.I.R., Syzygy presents The Invisible Hand alongside several sculptural works and prints, whose materials—soap, marble, and fabric—mirror and extend the textures of the Gouvernement into the space of the gallery. The Gouvernement’s extensive art collection is featured prominently in the film and the installation at A.I.R. serves to further blur the lines between spaces of art, government, and labor.
Sky Syzygy is a white queer trans femme film and installation maker and multidisciplinary artist, a racial justice facilitator, and a data scientist. In her work, she focuses attention on minor gestures, hidden trends, tactile points of contact, and ideological forces, and draws on the choreographic, the gender-fuck, and the quietly and deeply personal as tools in the fight for individual and collective agency and dignity.
Sky received an MFA from The New School, a degree in physics, and performed as a postmodern dancer in the US and internationally for over a decade. She has been in residence or a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery, the Jan Van Eyck Academie, the Art & Law program, Mass MoCA, the Atlantic Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and NARS Foundation. She is a data analyst at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a racial justice trainer and facilitator with Race Forward. Her films and installations have been exhibited in group shows and festivals in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia. skyolson.xyz
Photography: Matthew Sherman