In the balancing act of these towering figures, the volumetric elements of clothing becoming something much bigger than it is on the ground, there is the appearance of a kite about to fly away—tethered to the earth at Forest Park in Queens, of course, and held together by a crew of nine people, but still. The playfulness captured here is the result of much careful planning and engineering—one of the most effortful skills for an artist is the appearance of effortlessness. For example, the sculpture is lined with a couture clear plastic airtight form, made-to-measure based on the composition of the tower. Frazier layered two sheets of mylar from mattress covers and molded a silhouette with a soldering iron over a sheet of metal. In this task, she was reminded of the part in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan where a shadow gets loose and Wendy offers to sew it back on: the liner became the shadow of the sculpture.

When it came time to shoot, it was time for Todd Oldham, a designer and artist who knows how to have fun with any materials available: his origin story is that at fifteen he turned a pillowcase into a dress for his sister. Later, throughout the nineties, an entire generation named for a music television network tuned in for his House of Style D.I.Y. segments, where he’d teach teens how to make whatever they wanted from whatever they had. Here, absent a human model, the character of the Air Dancers is up to interpretation. What do these large beauties want? They have a good outfit, and they’re filled to the brim with that miraculous invisible mixture of atmosphere that surrounds our planet. They’re positively bouncing with possibility. In these ballooning tops and rippling pants there is that same ingenious, perhaps a little mischievous, feeling of an Oldham original: domestic couture as imagined by a true scamp.

In a 2016 interview about the interior design of his New York City home, Oldham said he has a “gardening approach” to decorating; he also cited this philosophy in an exhibition of his archive at RISD Museum. Just like in his ultramodern work, there is a season to everything Oldham does, and just like a season, it might pass but it doesn’t quite end. There is a similar quality in Frazier’s command over what is, in every sense, a force of nature. To think of the environment as a collaborator is to be humbled by its power: the climate keeps its own control. When Frazier was a student, she made a video piece of her school fan covered with toilet paper streamers, a kind of indoor tornado that was, upon reflection, what she considers her first attempt at domesticating the wind; the inflatable or the airiness of certain materials solves the problem of how to keep a big idea in a small space. Even art that is made outdoors, in public domains and with common materials, has a long list of requirements between technology and law (“Before I stick a shovel in the ground,” Frazier notes, “I am required to purchase general liability insurance.”)

The language that determines liability is usually called an “Act of God,” a reference to the idea that there are some events of such unstoppable force no tiny human on this rotating orb we call home can predict or plan for. Frazier knows there is an irony to this common phrase, “given the wealth of evidence proving that anomalous weather events are traceable to human interference with the environment.” Still, even knowing that doesn’t exclude the possibility of the divine. There is something spiritual about communing with the earth’s elements rather than trying to define them. When Frazier looks, she can see what appears as celestial ephemera: “wheat straw embedded in tree bark like blow darts, a steel beam heaved straight through a tree trunk, undamaged candles neatly embedded plaster walls, or a flower forced into the fabric of a plank of wood.” In sum, contained on these pages and floating all around us are the “natural but unnatural artifacts reminiscent of the work of an artist.”