A solo exhibition by Zibby Jahns at Old Dutch Church in Kingston, NY on view June & July 2026. This show includes four stone carvings installed in the 17th century cemetery amongst the headstones, and drawings in the Upper Gallery.

Through a series of letters to my ancestors and fragments of archive derived from extensive genealogical and academic research, I explore modern notions of borders, trauma, colonization and the fabrication of whiteness. Each “book” is in fact six different booklets with no bindings, all folded into different forms to match various paper ephemera (map, letter, passport, postcard accordion, etc) as an archive of thoughts and research on migration, religion, home and resistance. All paper for one dossier are derived from the dimensions of one parent sheet. One hundred dossiers made from one hundred sheets. The folder that holds them all introduces their theme and material, as well as the significance of folding and unfolding.

My 2025 solo show at Nikki at Mehle in LA exploring my ongoing Big Lith project.

Over the past few years, my work has been attuned to ecological transformation caused by extraction, especially in the high deserts of the Southwest. In 2023, I worked on a botanical survey of a 450 square mile valley in Nevada whose future may be in jeopardy. I was invited there as an artist who had previously made work providing space for people to publicly grieve the overdose crisis. 

As such, I have developed a speculative, fictitious film concept to examine America’s modern dependence on extraction as it decimates the natural world. Through my investigations of renewable energy, grief and de-growth movements, I constructed a fictional  narrative of a 2012 science fiction film, entitled Big Lith, that relates American reliance on extraction to a surveillance state, but wasn’t distributed due to shadowy, moneyed interests. As an extension of the speculative film itself, I fabricate objects, texts, sound and other ephemera from this film whose existence I’ve devised, then install them in urban galleries in order to engage the public in conversations about our endangered ecosystems.

My personal field recordings of the music that surrounds us—from New York to New Mexico to New Orleans and everywhere in between and outside: street sounds, deep listening, nature’s rhythms and unauthorized live music recordings edited to create a harmonious, psychedelic soundscape for your aural pleasure. Ideal tape for laying on the floor—behold as life sonically drifts around you for one hour.

Research and writing on the continuous Big Lith project, exploring High Desert ecosystems and our cultural reliance on extraction.