All around the world, clear skies were a widely observed consequence of stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic. Visibility dramatically increased as shrouds of smog was lifted, mountain ranges appeared and city dwellers expressed awe at crisp skylines. In her essay “Excavating the Sky”, Rebecca Solnit writes about the disappearance of the sky: “Ecologically speaking, the ozone layer is thinning, and we are losing our atmospheric protection from the cosmos; but aesthetically speaking, thicker and thicker layers of humanely produced stuff intervene between us and that cosmos.” The twenty-five paintings here concern our relationship to the troposphere, the bottommost layer of the atmosphere that extends from the surface of the earth upwards a few miles. It is where weather happens and where we breathe. I feel that to know the troposphere better is helpful in understanding the sky as a place key to our survival.

Solnit, Rebbeca. "Excavating the Sky." Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 143-164.

"All around the world, clear skies were a widely observed consequence of stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic. Visibility dramatically increased as shrouds of smog was lifted, mountain ranges appeared and city dwellers expressed awe at crisp skylines. In her essay “Excavating the Sky”, Rebecca Solnit writes about the disappearance of the sky: “Ecologically speaking, the ozone layer is thinning, and we are losing our atmospheric protection from the cosmos; but aesthetically speaking, thicker and thicker layers of humanely produced stuff intervene between us and that cosmos.” The twenty-five paintings here concern our relationship to the troposphere, the bottommost layer of the atmosphere that extends from the surface of the earth upwards a few miles. It is where weather happens and where we breathe. I feel that to know the troposphere better is helpful in understanding the sky as a place key to our survival. "- Ripley Whiteside

Solnit, Rebbeca. "Excavating the Sky." Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 143-164.