HVACuus is a photography project which captures the visible qualities of the expelled vapour released by HVAC systems (Heating Ventilation & Air Conditioning) of various art institutions and art conservation sites.

The project proposes a particular link between the interior activities of art institutions and the exterior exhaust that is a signature of these processes. The photographs capture the vapour in which trace elements of art works are ‘breathed’ out of a building on a daily basis. While acknowledging the discreet physicality of unique objects, HVACuus also recognizes the evanescent and ultimately unstable nature of art works. Over time, particles from all art works in a given collection disappear and collapse together on a nanoscopic level. Their particulate residue is then evacuated by the very building which protects them.

In creating a body of work focused on the elusive cloudy mass that continually rises up from such institutions, HVACuus obliquely references the historic interest that artists have had in clouds, mist, steam, and smoke as subject matter for their works. Representing one of the most fugitive, dynamic, and possibly destructive of substances, the idea of ‘visible air’ has moved along a symbolic trajectory that connects the picturesque to the sublime to the tragic—from Ruskin to Turner to the Twin Towers.