Aether has been the name given to whatever moves between worlds: the airspace through which light travels, the thin film between earth and heaven, the shimmering layer between what we sense and what we know. 

In classical Greek thought, aether (αἰθήρ) referred to the pure upper air that the gods breathed. It was considered the fifth element, a divine substance distinct from the heavier air of the mortal world. In alchemy and later metaphysical philosophy, aether was imagined as the unseen medium that permeates all space, connecting the celestial and terrestrial realms. It represented the essence of spirit or the soul of the cosmos. In early studies of physics that followed, “luminiferous ether” was a proposed invisible substance thought to carry light waves through space. While this theory was later disproven, it remains poetic in its implications of invisible connection and transmission. 

This exhibition brings together Ida Badal, Khaled Chamma, and Lowe Fehn, three artists whose practices approach transmissions of the immaterial, utilizing the language of abstraction to induce a sense of suspended materiality.

Ida Badal’s paintings exist on the quiet edge of a transformation, hinting at something emergent, a living membrane of light that appears to emanate from beneath the surface. In Illusory Passing, marks in rich clay and ochre evoke glints of light on the surface of water, folding into one another and into the faint suggestion of a horizon. In Fugue, the impression of snowdrift or ash‑fall gives way to a stillness that seems charged; the material dissolves as your vision focuses. Badal’s works feel attuned to atmospheres: the gradients between night and dawn, the quiet translucencies of skin or stone, the way a shadow or a reflection hovers between solidity and dissolution. Badal often grounds her ethereal sensibility in close observation of the natural world: scorched earth, cloud formations, the drift of smoke, the imperceptible ecology of what is decaying or becoming. 

Where Badal’s works cultivate stillness, Khaled Chamma’s works on paper activate. Rendered in colored pencil, the marks of the artist’s hand are evident. They form sweeps, ruptures, and tessalations. Chamma embeds the faint forms of animals into his works, blending them with imagery that recalls weather systems or electrical currents. In the largest work, Untitled (Foxes and Swans), tails, teeth, and wings echo and variagate. Bodily forms are not containers, but conduits. In his works on paper, Chamma suggests that the connecting forces of the natural world are volatile and alive, structured but wild, rhythmic but uncontainable. The veil thins around a site of impact: the viewer senses the trace of force, the imprint of a gesture, and the residual field of energy it leaves behind. In Chamma’s hands, aether is dynamic, restless, and insistent, a reminder that what is invisible can also be powerful and persistent. 

Lowe Fehn’s works in soft pastel on paper are the expressions of an intimate dialogue between body, material, and spirit. Fehn arrives at their compositions through gentle attentiveness, laying down and subtracting the pastel in translucent layers, trusting the movement of the hand to reveal forms that reside somewhere between the conscious and the subconscious. Often their works come about as responses to inner stirrings: an intense prayer, a half-awake memory, or an activating relational experience. In these drawings, aether is not distant or cosmic but immediate and embodied; the wind softly blowing through tall grass as in Little Ears, the warmth transferred to a held object as in Rare Touch, the feeling that lingers after a whisper in Wandering Eye. These works are atmospheres made visible and containers for inviting the viewer into the quiet unfolding of presence. 

Badal, Chamma, and Fehn offer three distinct approaches for attending to the liminal layer that surrounds us. They chart a spectrum of possibilities for giving form to that which resists form. In gathering these practices, Aether invites viewers to enter a space where the intangible finds a material expression. Proposing that aether itself is not an escape from matter but a way of returning to it, noticing how the physical world is always charged with something more: vibration, intuition, the residue of time and memory, the flicker of another realm brushing up against this one.