The exhibition took place during the transition into autumn. How did the changing season and landscape influence the works and your curatorial approach?

Alix Becker and I began organising the exhibition in early summer. At that time, autumn was just a shift waiting to come. Truthfully, I didn't want to think about the change of seasons because I wanted summer to last as long as possible. Taking autumn into consideration meant accepting that, quite literally, the temperature would eventually drop and the colour palette of the landscape in which the show was situated would undergo a drastic shift.

Some of the works had been made well before the exhibition, such as those by Eric Wolf and Trenton Duerksen. I chose to include them because they perfectly suited both the space and the concept of the show. As the surroundings changed, they influenced the resonance of the work and the tone the viewer brought with them into the space. Margot Becker, however, made her work in direct response to spending time on the farm, creating weavings inspired by that landscape at that specific moment. As the landscape shifted towards autumn, the contrast between her work and its surroundings became more pronounced.

My own work spoke directly to this change of seasons, specifically through my time-lapse video of wilting flowers. The exact same thing was happening outside.

The exhibition explored different boundaries between the natural and the manufactured. Did working at Twin Barns change the way you think about this relationship?

My thinking on this subject did not change, because it is a question I have been working with for a long time. But the exhibition made tangible just how false that binary really is. We are conditioned to view the manufactured as a violation of the natural, but standing inside a timber-frame barn exposes the flaw in that thinking.

Those barns are evidence of Alix and David Becker's deep consideration of, and collaboration with, the landscape, its conditions and time itself. They renovated the barns so thoroughly that they can safely accommodate artwork in all mediums, regardless of exterior conditions. Yet, with the barn doors open, the spaces felt just as interior as they did exterior.

As an artist and curator, I would not put my work, or that of others, in just any barn. These barns were rebuilt with the utmost care and quality, which is the same language I speak. They elevated the interior without shutting out the exterior.

For Edge Effect, I showed a video of myself flying inside the American Museum of Natural History, kept aloft purely by the building's HVAC currents. The force moving the air is mechanical, and the kite is manufactured, yet the physics of flight (gravity, tension and lift) are as natural as the wind outside. Twin Barns insisted on this same truth: both the space and the work within it are facts, and neither is any less “natural” than the other.

Twin Barns sits within a landscape shaped by both cultivation and wilderness, while the buildings themselves carry centuries of human intervention. How did these layers of the site inform the exhibition?

A historic structure cannot hide its past. To bring art into a site like Twin Barns requires modesty. If the quality of the work demanded a museum space, the barns would make you look foolish. You have to acknowledge that eras of labour, livestock and weathering took place here long before our precious artwork arrived.

We chose to let the art sit among those layers. Trenton's sculptures carried the unpretentious intelligence of vernacular carpentry; Margot's weavings echoed the view from the windows in front of which they hung; Eric's landscapes reflected the surrounding terrain while holding their own in stark black-and-white contrast to the barn's dark wood; and my time-based works introduced a figurative anachronism against the grain of the space.

The exhibition was not an intervention, but an appropriate deposit laid upon the place. We live in a time when it has become normal to put artwork in a barn. This was not always the case!

Your work often looks at transformation and impermanence, from cut flowers to artificially generated weather. What does the process of dismantling an exhibition add to this exploration of temporality?

Dismantling forces the concept into physical reality. Our culture is desperate to hide the mechanics of decay, engineered to make objects appear invulnerable. But in my practice, decay is not a failure. Still, I must ensure that my work can be relatively archival while retaining its ability to capture the ephemeral.

De-installing a show refutes the illusion that art can somehow step outside the rhythm of living and dying. I don't exactly like this confrontation! However, the strict timeframe of an exhibition is precisely what grants it urgency. We pay attention to it only because we know it will not wait for us.

But it is never easy to part with a show, whether the work is going to a new home or back into the racks.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.