Tough Guy

Snow-swept landscapes and crumbling concrete structures are the bewitchingly bleak backdrop for tough-as-nails characters who live their crunchy, uninterrupted lives within these frames, and go on living outside of them in all their red-blooded mundanity. The very young and the very old are frequent subjects, like parentheses to a long life of hard endurance and snatched moments of clumsy joy. Boys caught in hooligan horseplay feel like brethren to the viewer — but ‘caught’ is the wrong word, since these images give the distinct impression that the photographer, moments after snapping his pictures, set down his camera and joined in the shenanigans.

“I like traveling around the country and taking pictures of the ordinary lives of ordinary people. It is sad to hear people say I capture the seamy side. I don’t see anything horrible in these pictures of mine. They are not just ‘social photography,’ as many people see them, they are my personal encounters and scenes. Every picture is like another chapter in my own history. And when I get asked why I go after ‘life’s unpleasant side,’ I reply: ‘Because I am part of it.’" - Dmitry Markov.

'Portrait of a Raifa Special School Pupil for Children with Deviant Behavior. Christopol Republic of Tatarstan Russia.'

#DRAFT #RUSSIA is on view through June 4th at agnes b. Boutique Gallery. Images courtesy of the gallery. Lead image: "[Time] to death". Haircut of 18-years old teenager, before his release from orphanage. Idritsa, Pskov region. Série #Draft #Russia, 2016 © Dmitry Markov Courtesy Joe Baio Photography Collection.

Check out Dmitry's book, Cut Off, out now.

Art

Silence Speaks in Staccato

Edward Said wrote in his memoir Out of Place that “all families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language.” He, of course, was speaking in the context of a particular identity formulation that you both share: the experience of the Palestinian diaspora. Could you tell me a bit about what was invented for you, both by your family themselves, and the diaspora as a kind of family? And in that vein, what do you hope to invent yourself?

What I've learned from my dad, and the stories he’s shared with me, is that as an immigrant you have to carve a space for yourself that doesn’t already exist. I’ve taken that into consideration for myself as an artist. If you’re conveniently plugging yourself into something that's readily available then you aren’t really challenging yourself. Having to carve a space for yourself is a ubiquitous experience for many immigrants, not just Palestinians in the Diaspora. I think we have that in common with a lot of different groups as well.

It can often feel, when I speak to Palestinian artists and intellectuals in this country, that there’s a tension between Palestine as a kind of imaginary, or a symbol, and Palestine as it exists. How do you, and by extension, your work, navigate this relationship?

I’m always encouraging Palestinians in diaspora to visit the motherland if they've never been or haven’t re-visited in the last five years. Of course, this is easier said than done. Many Palestinians aren’t as fortunate as I am, because they’ve been exiled from ever being able to return. But I encourage this because there is a kind of fantasy-land that the diaspora projects onto contemporary Palestine. Even that term “contemporary palestine” is an oxymoron unto itself. But in my work I try to depict the actuality of the kitsch, the Abrahamic, the colloquial, and the agriculture that all exist in one place. The bizarreness of all those elements can be overstimulating: I often feel like it is a type of disney-land after all.

That makes total sense.

Yeah, it’s bizarre: you walk out of the church of nativity and you see several store fronts that have been there for ages, and they have this huge coca-cola banner because they’re being sponsored by coca-cola.

Untitled, 2023.

Right, and I think “Disneyland” is an interesting descriptor given the corporate element. I know your work in the past has been invested in the ways in which corporations and globalization interact with and have affected pre-colonial culture.

A lot of the disney stories themselves were derived from Abrahamic faith tales.

What was it like moving between St. Louis and The West Bank as a kid? Did you experience it more as a kind of liminalism (an in between-ness) or more of a full immersion in both, or neither?

Before the age of cell phones and the internet I spent a lot of time outside and exploring the land. I was able to walk everywhere in the area I grew up in America— I didn’t have a lot of constraints like residential streets leading to a main street. I’d spend a lot of time hiking. That isn’t the case in The West Bank. You can only walk in the confines of your village. That’s not to say that there’s a gate around the village, but you just know the boundaries. If you strayed too far, you’d be trespassing into a neighboring settlement which would cost you your life. Those types of severities were so normalized I didn’t understand the concept of apartheid as a kid. You know those types of stories your parents would share with you, like “if you do this or don’t do this the boogeyman is gonna come after you?” It felt like that: if you go too far, you’re going to be shot by the boogeyman, a.k.a. a settler. That was my understanding of what apartheid, that difference, was as a kid.

Can you explain what you were trying to express with this piece “Noman’s Land” from your series At Home in Your New Home? I find it quite powerful.

I feel like every American artist should take the opportunity to reinterpret the American flag through the lens of their own relationship to it. I made the piece in 2019, and it was my way of grappling with the anti-arab racism and islamophobia being propagated in America by the Trump administration with the “Muslim ban” that he issued. I remember when I got the work framed, the employee was so offended by the stars being opted out for the Keffiyeh and the shades of Arab complexion for the red stripes. And I asked: how do you identify with a land or a place without its stifling bureaucracy? We give meaning and purpose to a state, and if we rely on it being the other way around, we’ve become complicit with limitation and indoctrination.

Noman's Land, 2019.

That’s profound. And obviously the piece has taken on more urgency given the events of the last few months. Sadly it doesn’t surprise me that the employee was offended, but it’s good that you challenged them.

Yeah. I could tell that she wanted to make an excuse in order to attempt to not service it, like give a technical reason it couldn’t be done, claiming that it was a “loose object.” I was like, “why don’t you just make the frame for me and I'll keep the piece and mount it myself.” So they couldn’t legally say that they refused to service me [laughs].

How do you feel about the radical shift in discourse following October 7th? I'm curious particularly how you as an artist, a mode of being so intrinsically tied to expression, feel about the turbulent mass of attention being brought to Palestine and its history. Does the pressure to speak out feel stronger than the pressure not to speak out? Have you found the pressure to align yourself with any particular identity or political movement oppressive?

It gives me hope for my people and for humanity that there’s unwavering support for Palestinians that hasn’t been present before because people are becoming aware. I’ve taken it upon myself to be assigned with two tasks along the way. One is “attraction, not promotion,” and the second is to be completely authentic in the journey of doing so. When I learned that people became gravitated to supporting our liberation through the humanization of my people, I realized I just have to continue story-telling through art-making and my experiences. I think that things like that are only oppressive if you listen to people’s criticism along the way. Many people have been trying to police the ways in which I highlight humanitarian and societal issues. My response is to remind others that they have their own ability to represent the issues that they want to, and that everyone has a role in this. The radical shift in discourse hasn’t been limited to just Palestine, now we’re talking about collective liberation that calls for justice to be brought to the people of Congo, Sudan, Syria, Iran, and marginalized communities across America. I think that’s the most radical shift in discourse since October 7th.

Untitled, 2023.

I saw that you’ve been bringing your paintings to protests, is this a common practice for you? I’m curious if you could delve into what that relationship to art in a political/public space is like for you, as opposed to a fine art space like a gallery.

I’ve been going to protests since I was in a stroller, and I had given up on demonstrating for years until this most recent uprising. I was in my studio, painting, feeling hopeless and contemplating if I even wanted to tap into the first protest after October 7th. I was painting a poppy flower when my home-girl hit me up and asked me to join her at the demonstration. So I just took the canvas off the wall and held it up at the march. I’m very anti-flags and I reject nationalism, so this forced me to think of more ways to approach identity free of state-politics. After I’d gotten resignations from galleries who didn’t want anything to do with Palestine or a Palestinian artist, my purpose shifted towards activism. I didn’t want to compromise being an artist just because I lost opportunities or because I'm in immense grief, so I've been considering how to make protest a performance art. After all, M.L.K. was the greatest performance artist of the 20th century.

Totally. There is an art to protest. And I think your praxis speaks to a lot of the criticism of the fine-art world: the notion of art as purely decorative, of a piece as an ornament.

It’s also an institutional thing. Paintings are often hung up on a white wall, attempting to be pristine. There’s something grittier about taking it outside on a walk as the piece collects outside contaminants that otherwise wouldn’t appear on it. I’ve been working on these poppy paintings, which have now become a series, because the poppy is the national flower of Palestine. Every protest, demonstration, or activism meeting that I take part in, I’ll take a new painting and hold it up in place of a sign or something with words. I’m considering how the environment I'm in is a kind of installation: it’s giving context to what I stand for. And I want to incorporate the poppy to be a signature element in order to reference our Palestinian landscape. What I imagine for this ongoing series is that for the next spring protest I’ll distribute the collection of poppy paintings that I've created along the way to protestors so that we hold it up and become a field of poppies during the spring equinox.

Wow. That’s beautiful, I didn’t realize you had that meta-intention. That’s a powerful image. On the topic of expression, what does it mean to you to make art in the midst of violence, especially an on-going violence like that which has existed in Palestine for so long? This brings to mind the Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul’s poem which made the rounds on social media recently:

"In order for me to write poetry that isn't political,

I must listen to the birds

and in order to hear the birds

the warplanes must be silent"

I know that you went to the West Bank to continue your practice last summer, and also have recently made another trip there. I’m curious how these experiences may have changed your perspective on this topic, if they have at all. This also ties into my previous question about the cacophony of chaos that is public discourse at the moment, which is its own “warplane.”

Yeah. That was one of the first poems I saw circulated. I think a lot of artists that work in the realm of politics and identity resonated with it. Do you remember the combat field musicians that they taught us about in history class? I’m starting to realize that my favorite place to be an artist is where it’s most dangerous to be an artist. I feel like I've been assigned a new role amidst the chaos that’s beyond my control, the role of art-journalist: making art in real-time, touching physically whatever’s on the ground, disdaining the pillars of smoke off in the distance. I think this most recent experience made the notion of art-journalism really immediate and urgent. It felt really free too. There was also a lot of censorship I had to be weary about. But when it feels like you have nothing to lose, you’re going to be most vulnerable and create really good art.

Untitled, 2023.

My last question has to do with the state of the art-world more directly. What kind of relationship to the art-world bureaucracy have you had in the past, and has it shifted in the last few months, if at all? If it has, how has this relationship changed?

What’s been going on in the last few months is not a new issue that I personally have been dealing with in the art world. The bureaucracy, censorship, economic, social, and environmental injustices are all interconnected. I see this issue as a moral litmus test that has bled into the art-world, which should be the place to hold this discourse. So much of the art-world is like “we don’t want to be involved in politics.” But the ongoing art-movement in the last decade has been about identity politics, so people have been picking and choosing which identities and stories are palatable and worthy of being drawn from. And has that changed as of now? It’s still definitely in effect, but I hope that this isn’t swept under the rug. I know a lot of artists, the real heads out there, aren’t going to be ok with it being swept under the rug. Because they understand how hypocritical it would be considering their practices, which involve so much political identity discourse.

Right. So you feel like it’s really only a matter of time, at this point, before these things change.

Yeah. Every week now a new story appears about another art-group being canceled or resigning from some sort of show. And there’s so many stories that haven’t been covered of decisions of artists to not work with a gallery as a result of it’s hypocritical stance on Palestine or censoring Palestinian artists, even if those artists haven’t made a public statement about it. I think what’s really beautiful about what’s going on is the solidarity network that a lot of artists are feeling compelled to execute.

I totally agree. Thank you so much Saj.

Art

The Guggenheim at the Edge of Visibility

January 30, 2024

Featuring over 100 works contributed by 28 artists, Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility engages the questions of representation and visibility through works of art that depict partially or fully concealed figures. The works explore the friction between the desire to be recognized and the frustration of overexposure and distortion. These artists illuminate the power and protection that can be found in the dark, particularly in a time of accelerating surveillance, commodification, and tokenization. They consider the various rewards — safety, anonymity, privacy, sovereignty, self-preservation, even pleasure — that can be derived from remaining unseen. To go dark is a literal and metaphorical strategy to critique the representations put forth by the institution and the archive, and to evade the consequences of total legibility.

In a significant demographic departure for the Guggenheim, the majority of the contributing artists are Black; more than half of them are women. office was fortunate enough to speak with curator Dr. Ashley James, as well as American Artist and Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, two of the contributing artists that created new works for Going Dark.

By Samuel Getachew
Photos Midge Wattles © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

A long lineage of Black artists that have engaged the “edge of visibility” make up the ideological ancestry of Going Dark. “The traditional esthetic of black art, often considered pragmatic, uncluttered and direct, really hinges on secrecy and disguise,” Guyanese-American painter Frank Bowling wrote in his 1971 essay “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black is Beautiful.’” “The understanding is there, but the overwhelming drive is to make it complicated, hidden, acute.” In the following decade, artist Lorna Simpson would turn on Bowling’s secretive hinges – a 180 degree turn, to be precise — utilizing the compositional device of the Rückenfigur to deny the viewer’s gaze by turning her subjects away from the camera. “I am invisible,” says the unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, “simply because you refuse to see me.” For Simpson, however, the power of her images lay in reclaiming the power of that refusal for the subject. The elusive eponymous figures of Faith Ringgold’s paintings Black Light Series #3: Invisible Man #1 (1968) and Black Light Series #3: Invisible Woman #1 (1968) also derive their (in)visibility from a refusal to be fully seen, as do the figures in Kerry James Marshall’s paintings Invisible Man (1986) and Two Invisible Men (1985). In her Invisible Man Series (1988-1991), which documents the residents of a Harlem neighborhood, Ming Smith withholds the identities of her subjects by intentionally producing blurred and low-light images — refusing to deprive them of their anonymity.

For some of the younger artists in the show, going dark is a strategy to evade the pernicious shadow of surveillance and overexposure in the digital age. Some artists in the exhibition go dark by literally darkening their images and paintings, using pigmentation, monochrome, opacity, or lighting techniques; others modulate their (in)visibility through material selections and print methods; still others go dark by way of technological interventions like chroma-key greenscreen/bluescreen and Photoshop.

Black Studies has always had a really skeptical and complicated relationship to representation — the question of representation is endemic to my field.

Installation view, Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 20, 2023–April 7, 2024. Photo: Midge Wattles © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Lorna Simpson, "Double Negative," 1990–2022. Gelatin silver print, 45 × 36 in. (114.3 × 91.4 cm), edition 3/3. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Lorna Simpson, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: James Wang

Faith Ringgold, "Black Light Series #4: Mommy and Daddy," 1969. Oil on canvas, 30 × 23 1/8 in. (76.2 × 61.3 cm). Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York. © 2023 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York

Since James began her tenure at the Guggenheim in 2019, the (art) world has seen a drastic upheaval in how it navigates issues around race, reaching a fever pitch in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd. That turbulent “reckoning,” as many have called it, has seen an equally inelegant decrescendo in the years since. It is difficult to engage with the questions posed by Going Dark without calling to mind the art world’s habit of tokenizing Black curators; when David Zwirner hired curator Ebony L. Haynes to head a new gallery at 52 Walker in 2020, the opening line from the New York Times announcement of her position referred to her merely as “a gallerist who is Black”; the Times article announcing Dr. James’ own appointment in 2019 opened with, “At a time when museums all over the country are trying to increase the number of people of color on its staff, boards and walls, the Guggenheim Museum has hired its first full-time black curator: Ashley James.” Going Dark’s engagement with the precarity of representation feels especially timely, arriving at a moment when the diluted mainstream agenda of identity politics seems to be collapsing in on its shallow foundations.

But that timeliness wasn’t on James’s mind as she assembled the exhibition. “I never like to think about my exhibitions as responding to the cultural moment,” says James, who earned her PhD from Yale in African American Studies and English Literature. “Black studies has always had a really skeptical and complicated relationship to representation — the question of representation is endemic to my field.” As for her own place in that relationship: “I wouldn’t say it was an autobiographical working-out of a question, but in the same way that I say that representation is just a critical discourse of the 21st century, it's not a surprise that I would then be implicated in that too,” James says, sounding somewhat surprised that I made the connection. “I'm certainly aware of what my position vis-a-vis the museum is in terms of my blackness,” she concedes. “And that I'm the one going dark, or forcing the museum to go dark, and ushering the Black people into this white space.”

While Going Dark marks James’ second exhibition at the Guggenheim, it’s her first in the rotunda. She worked on the exhibition and catalogue for about a year and a half after settling on its concept. Between spring of 2022 and the opening of the exhibit in October 2023, James spent a lot of time with replica models of the familiar white spiraling ramps and clandestine bays of the rotunda. Filling a space of that scale presents a unique challenge for a curator, but such a distinctive venue can also engender new ideas. It was in a meeting over one of those replica models that American Artist and Dr. James came to a realization that birthed the former’s site-specific installation Surveillance Theater (2023): the Guggenheim resembles philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s late-eighteenth-century concept of the panopticon. “As a correlation, I think it's a little on the nose, but at the same time a lot of people don't necessarily think about that,” says American Artist. “The only thing that's missing is this central tower.” In place of that tower, they created a conspicuous globe that hangs from the oculus above the rotunda, recording visitors through 360-degree CCTV cameras. From the camera’s view, everyone in the rotunda is visible — for better or worse.

What if I show the way that this museum and all museums are implicated in this relationship with the courthouse, the university, the jail, the factory, the airport...

“Knowing the scale and significance of this institution, I wanted to do something that I felt would play with the uniqueness of what that opportunity allowed,” American Artist explains. “I was thinking of people visiting as a component in the work — the average Guggenheim Museum-goer, what are they expecting? What if I show the way that this museum and all museums are implicated in this relationship with the courthouse, the university, the jail, the factory, the airport — all of these things have similarities, especially bureaucratically and economically — the way that even beyond my piece, you have to go through security to get in the building. I wanted to do something that feels like it's everywhere, and I think the surveillance aspect played into that.” Behind a curtain in one of the rotunda’s bays are several 4K monitors that display a live feed from the camera, equipped with an AI software that matter-of-factly and somewhat touchingly identifies each moving visitor with the onscreen label of “human.” But in order to enter and view the live feed, visitors must first relinquish their phones and place them in small locked pouches provided by an attendant. To have the pouches unlocked, they must return to the ground floor of the museum. According to American Artist, the idea of temporarily dispossessing visitors of their phones preceded the rest of Security Theater.

“I think of it as a sort of trade-off for this abundance of visuality,” they describe. “That room as an offering was an attempt to seduce people into being willing to give over their phone, and then partake in that experience of not having their phone. Most people think it's the other way around, but the room is actually there to get you to give your phone away.” Those who continue after Security Theater, instead of immediately descending to unlock the phone pouch as I saw several visitors do, experience the remainder of the exhibit disconnected to the digital realm. In my own visit to Going Dark, I was immediately struck by how naked I felt without access to my notes app or my camera — and powerless to access my own tool of surveillance and documentation.

Sondra Perry, "Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation," 2016. Digital color video, with sound, 9 min., 5 sec.; and bicycle workstation, 68 × 42 × 16 in. (172.7 × 106.7 × 40.6 cm). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of Jim Cahn and Jeremy Collatz, 2019. © Sondra Perry. Photo: Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

Sandra Mujinga, "Spectral Keepers," 2020 (detail). Tulle fabric, cotton fabric, nylon thread, threaded rods, wire clamps, cellular concrete. Each Figure: 109 7/16 × 31 1/2 × 14 3/4 inches ( 278 × 80 × 40 cm). Each Basket: 30 5/16 × 30 5/16 × 38 3/16 inches (77 × 77 × 97 cm). Private collection. © Sandra Mujinga. Photo: Plastiques, courtesy the artist and The Approach, London.

In this time where I think there is a desire for the audience to consume everything, to consume ideas, to consume the Black figure in a certain way, I have to have some obscurity to also allow distance and sustain my own desire for my own work.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s series of paintings Very, Very Slightly (2023) also seduce the viewer into participating in the work, in this instance with prayer benches placed in front of the paintings atop a plush red carpet. The paintings depict advertisements for Black femme mistresses pulled from 1960s and 70s BDSM magazines and are printed on leather, a material that appears often in McClodden’s work. The figures of these women are rendered in black, blue, and red dyes and the diamond dust that gives the paintings their name: a type of diamond known as “very very slightly” or VVS for its subtle flaws that create a distinctive sparkle. The women in the paintings are elusive to the eye and — as I learned when I submitted to the prayer benches — most visible when one kneels before them.

“Especially with the red carpet, I'm definitely thinking about churches, specifically Catholic churches, and spaces of piety and prayer. But there's this other aspect of trying to figure out how to tease at people's desire,” McClodden says. “The best view is on your knees, and that's just it. I had to get on my knees repeatedly to make this work, so I'm transferring something that I enacted for myself.” Very, very slightly diamonds or VVSs are popular references in music, particularly in hip hop — I personally think of the VVS cufflinks promised by Beyoncé to her lover in the “Upgrade U” outro. “I am a child of hip hop, and I was born and raised in the south. I heard it but I had no idea what VVS meant. I was too poor to. And then I got to a certain age and I found out. The idea that the diamond that Black people like the most is beloved because of its sparkle and its imperfection and its shine: I was like, oh God, how beautiful and poetic,” McClodden explains. “And then thinking about leather and the idea of employing it… leather is fine over time, but it still has to shine. “Very, very slightly” is literally how I have to deal with the leather. I can't be abusive to it, otherwise it rejects the work that I'm trying to give it. I thought that it would be something very beautiful to bring my cultural relationship to the diamond and blackness, and think about these Black women as these kinds of diamonds, and figure them as such.”

Very, Very Slightly addresses the connection between the erotic and the unseen more directly than any other work in Going Dark. As both a member of the BDSM community and a contemporary artist with aversions to hypervisibility, McClodden has spent a lot of time thinking about the kinds of pleasures that can only be sustained away from view. “I like to play in the areas of distance,” she says. “I'm not exactly interested in going there all the way — I like not consuming something because it makes me still have a desire for it. In this time where I think there is a desire for the audience to consume everything, to consume ideas, to consume the Black figure in a certain way, I have to have some obscurity to also allow distance and sustain my own desire for my own work.” Her unwillingness to offer herself up to that kind of consumption in tandem with her work is part of why McClodden chooses to live in Philadelphia, where she feels she can maintain a greater anonymity. “Visibility as someone who often tries to hide is really something I'm always dealing with trying to negotiate. Currently I’m at this point in my career where I'm reclaiming a particular space and visibility of how I want to be seen, how I want my work to be seen.”

American Artist echoes a similar apprehension of the visibility that accompanies their practice and career. “The further I get into my work, I want you to just spend more time with the thing I'm trying to say, and I feel like it's going to happen less and less.” When I ask what makes them feel the most exposed, their reply surprises me. “This show. I think the visibility of this show in our professional sense is really next level,” says American Artist. “The idea that anyone could come up and see this thing that is very close to me and has been close to me for a long time does feel sort of exposing.”

To close our conversation in the Guggenheim’s reading room, I ask the two artists which would frighten them more: to be seen always and completely, or never at all?

“To be seen always and completely,” McClodden answers. “I've spent the majority of my life being overlooked, even in the more intimate spaces of family and everything. I was such a quiet kid. I distinctly remember thinking I could be invisible or something. And as much as that could be a painful thing, it actually is immense relief right now, which is what I like. As soon as I get back into Philly, I'm invisible.”

“To be seen never at all is more frightening to me,” American Artist says swiftly and decisively.

As I thank the two artists for our conversation and gather my belongings, I think of the words of Fred Moten: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” As I emerge from the museum, I mentally prepare myself to be in the world again — to believe in it, to relent to its gaze. I prepare to be seen.

"Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility" is on view at the Guggenheim from October 20, 2023 until April 7, 2024.

Art

"Freedom Love" at WHAAM!

Using colors that are simultaneously “too dark and too bright,” Dorrey unveils a “fragile utopia amidst digital chaos” where “Black joy emerges even within the bounds of a grotesque haze.” On the other hand, Ramales’ playful assemblages combine "emblems of faith, cartoons, and imagery from the artist’s everyday life" to tell stories that straddle the balance between fantasy and reality.

Made on his phone, Dorrey’s exaggerated photo manipulations and distorted characters evoke the familiar haze of memories squeezed into the fanciful confines of a dream, while Ramales’ cartoonish depictions take on an unexpected realism. Ramales often combines painting with found objects. His love letters on old composition notebook paper and figurative depictions place an emphasis on “Mexican and American working-class iconography and totems of Roman Catholicism”, while drawing from accessible cultural references. Alongside one another, Dorrey and Ramales' bodies of work, while different in style and reference, seem to tell separate parts of the same story.

See for yourself at 15 Elizabeth St #113, New York, NY 10013.