Caroline Allison: The Weight of Wind, Oct 3 - Nov 1, 2025

ZieherSmith opens its first gallery solo exhibition with Caroline Allison on Friday, Oct 3rd. The show is titled The Weight of Wind and will be on view through November 2, 2025. Drawing on sources from medieval texts to recent scientific and environmental discoveries, Allison works with a large format camera to document and reflect on the ways in which we perceive and engage with the natural world. Her unusual effects are created in-camera through multiple exposures or by transforming the paper into unique objects.

The show features two bodies of work: her largest to date from her billowing Book of Hours sky pieces and a series of six lush landscapes, also titled The Weight of Wind.

Allison’s skyscapes are hand-shaped, wall-relief photographs that take inspiration from a medieval Book of Hours. The works feature cloud-filled skies that evoke meditations, incantations, and prayers to our reliably changeable environment. The clouds gather and pass, the sun rises and sets, and at appointed times throughout the day, photographs were made to capture these transformations. After printing the image, Allison wets and physically manipulates the print into a new permanent shape, thus transforming the flat print into a wavy wall relief echoing its billowing subject. Critic Laura Hutson Hunter writes that the work “challenges the formal boundaries that separate painting, photography and sculpture.”

The Weight of Wind editioned works are composite landscapes (comprised of up to one hundred exposures) that reveal the uncanny nature of the elements and the passage of time. The resulting images juxtapose painterly, impressionist images of trees with moments of high contrast where the wind had little or no effect. These wild landscapes exist in overlooked areas of Nashville, green verges along the highway or fed by some of the few unimpaired areas of Brown’s Creek, the watershed that flows under and throughout the city.