If you’re wandering through one of the city’s old low-horizon neighborhoods, you might glimpse—near the occasional long-dead TV aerial or defunct clothesline pulley—a vent turbine. Silvery-bright, these spherical fans catch any passing breeze and pull hot air out of attics or kitchens; with their slatted blades, which bulge in the middle and converge on top, they vaguely resemble onion domes.

Demetrius Oliver was born in Brooklyn in 1975, and over the years has no doubt seen plenty of these fans dotting the urban roofscape. In his multivalent exhibition, “Pneumato,” Oliver creates a web that entangles the earthbound with the ethereal. In Pneumatic, a pair of wall-mounted industrial fans blow across a narrow hallway onto two flat-screen monitors, each playing a video of spinning vent turbines—a melding of the real with represented effect. A decal of a fan at the center of each of the protective grills covering the actual fan blades doubles down on Oliver’s mix of objects and their 2-D doppelgängers. Read More