Composition of a Tear

Aaron Young

December 1st – January 16th, 2026

Opening Reception: December 1st 7 - 11 PM

Artist Performance: December 1st, promptly at 9 PM

KDR is pleased to present Composition of a Tear, Aaron Young’s first exhibition with the gallery. Through sculpture and performance, Young explores the tensions between creation and destruction, permanence and impermanence, and the transformative power of materials.

At the center of the exhibition is a four-foot cube built by hand from roughly three-quarters of a ton of dry ice, with a stack of salt blocks shaped like the letter X running through its body. Over the course of one day, the ice sublimates, passing directly from solid to gas. As the blocks shrink, their seams widen, and the salt “X” descends until it rests on the floor. 

For Young, the blocks suggest individuals within a shared structure, and the “X” represents institutions meant to hold it up. As the ice disappears, the relationship reverses, and the framework depends on the very bodies it appeared to support. What first reads as a single, stable mass reveals the separate parts and precarious relationships that held it together all along. The gradual disappearance will be documented and presented as a video installation, so that the video becomes the monument, an enduring record of a structure that no longer exists.

Iterating on the ephemeral exploration of impermanence, on opening night at 9 PM, six motorcycle riders will perform, recording speed, sound, pressure, and physical exertion as smoke and residue fill the space. Inside, six Plexiglas panels turn from image to structure. Tinted orange, blue, and smoke, each is cut into architectural silhouettes that evoke great brutalist architects such as Valerio Olgiati, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph, whose monolithic buildings carry a sense of mass and an unsettling calm. Young renders this language of density in a material where light passes straight through. Etched into each panel is a scene of collapsed infrastructure: an obliterated bridge, the aftermath of a flood, an incinerated forest, a capsized ship, a scorched European government building, mirrored in their reflections. 

Short contradicting phrases in a dot-matrix font, reminiscent of a commercial paper receipt, running across the surface: “THE UPSIDE OF DOWN”, “CUSTOM BUILT DESIRE”, “HARD AND FAST”, “YOU CAN SEE THE PAIN IN MY LAUGH”, “NO COVER NO MINIMUM” and “HOW MUCH DOES IT COST IF IT'S FREE”. Each phrase holds two opposing states at once, the same way a tear is both a rupture and something to be shed, and the same way each etched image mirrors itself in reverse. 

Across these works, Composition of a Tear dwells in the moment an action ends and an object begins. What endures is not the thing itself, but the trace it leaves behind, and in that trace, collapse becomes its own composition.

Aaron Young (b. 1972) received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 and his MFA from Yale University in 2004. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as part of the 2006 Whitney Biennial; MoMA PS1, New York (2005); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); and the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007). Notable solo exhibitions include the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2012); MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2010); and PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, Naples (2009). Recent projects for Young include And After, Good Mother Gallery, CA; Drop for "Video Drive", BFI Miami, FL; Florida Room V, KDR, Miami, FL; and The Right Way to Do Wrong, UTA Artist Space, CA. His work is held in prominent public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Young lives and works in Miami, Florida.