Sofia Duchovny / Muyeong Kim / Xtina Vargas / Julia Znoj

The Ides of Summer
01.08.2025 - 29.08.2025

The Ides of Summer

There are days that smell like burnt sugar and something else I can’t name. The Ides of Summer aren’t on any calendar. They are a pause. A hesitation in the middle of thought. A breath held too long. Impending doom. It’s not the day itself but the feeling that rises with it, something like dread disguised as warmth. An omen, yes, but not the dramatic kind. More like a ripple in the stillness, a quiet rearranging of the air. You only notice it later, after something has happened. After something is no longer there.

They say summer is the season of joy. And it is. That’s why it’s so disarming. The sun makes you sleepy, slow. It conspires in a secret language. The body becomes heavy with ease, and in that slackness—something takes you. And in that heat — god, that swollen, sticky heat — something took them. One by one.

Death didn’t come like a storm. It came like a hammock’s sway, like falling asleep under a tree with half a peach in your mouth, drunk from light and belly-full silence. It happened in the days after lunch, when the sky whitens with weight,and the flesh wants to forget it is flesh. The hour of the satyr —when the gods walk sideways in the corners of your sleep,pressing leaves to your eyelids, making you dream of something

you won't remember except in fragments, except in sweat.

We used to laugh in that heat. But now I remember them most when the sun is strongest — as if memory becomes visible only when blinded.

That summer, they began to disappear. Not dramatically. No screams, no catastrophes. Quiet. One stopped returning calls. Ones’s sandals were left by the door. Ones’s laugh, the loudest among us, was replaced by a silence that somehow made the air colder, even in the heat.

It wasn’t illness. It wasn’t an event. That thick, narcotic heat that turns bones into syrup and thoughts into fog. You sit beneath a tree after lunch, and you begin to forget you’re real. The hour of satyrs, when the mind loosens its grip on reason. You fall asleep and wonder, later, whether something passed through you while you slept. Whether that wasn’t sleep at all.

We used to gather in that heat and think we were eternal. We’d lie down in the grass, letting the sun blind us. I remember them most vividly in that specific kind of light—the white-yellow of early afternoon, when time becomes soft around the edges. As if the sun were an old film reel spinning out.

And then they were gone. And I was left with images. Photographs. Not many. Just enough to remind me that remembering is not the same as having. A photo is a lie that pretends to hold time. It doesn’t. It holds the absence of time. The evidence that something once was.

Glass. Steel. Light. A photograph is a strange machine of grief. Glass lets the image pass through. Steel holds the frame. Light, the traitor, illuminates and vanishes in the same gesture. They come together to trap something fleeting, and then they do. Never have I taken a pictures of the future.

Steel is the only one that doesn’t betray us. It doesn't soften with heat or weep with light. It holds the apparatus while we dissolve in emotion, in memory, in sunstroke. Steel is the stillness we cannot be. Glass and Picture, they need transferring and why is steel the material that can be there for them to get that job done. Stiff but there.And the summer—still here. Still humming. Still bright and cruel. It covers everything like a white sheet over furniture In this heat, something is always about to happen. Or has already happened.

Sofia Duchovny, not titled yet (Monolith), 2024, wood, glass

Muyeong Kim, Foe, This Little Pause on The Road to You, a Cloud That Hides My Fever, Flowing Blue and Blue, Convinced by The Westering Sun, to Conjure in Your House, 2025, pigment print (2024) on museum etching paper, gloss varnish, artist’s frame in eel leather

Muyeong Kim, Foe, This Little Pause on The Road to You, a Cloud That Hides My Fever, Flowing Blue and Blue, Convinced by The Westering Sun, to Conjure in Your House, 2025, pigment print (2024) on etching paper, gloss varnish, artist’s frame in eel leather

Xtina Vargas, Paw Print (Survival Mode), 2025, inkjet prints on vellum, petroleum jelly, LED light strip, wood, glass

Xtina Vargas, Moth (Angela), 2025, inkjet prints on vellum, petroleum jelly, wig, tobacco, LED light strips, wood, glass

Muyeong Kim, oe, This Little Pause on The Road to You, a Cloud That Hides My Fever, Flowing Blue and Blue, Convinced by The Westering Sun, to Conjure in Your House, 2025, pigment print (2024) on museum etching paper, gloss varnish, artist’s frame in stingray leather

1. Julia Znoj, Derive and Replenish, Steel, aluminum, found objects
2. Julia Znoj, Dissipation Loop, 2025, Steel, copper wire, found objects

1. Julia Znoj, Setup (Direct Current), 2025, Laboratory power supply, zinc electrolyte, water, paint,steel, aluminum, paper, glue, glass, wire, found object
2. Julia Znoj, Night bird struck again, 2025, Steel, found objects, rust converter