Ramp’s Edge
ft. Ayanna Dozier, Won Ju Lim, Irini Miga, and Josh Rondeau.
Curated by Marissa Graziano
Jan 18, 2025 — Feb 22, 2025
Opening Saturday, January 18, 2025 from 5-7 pm
53 Orchard St.
Ramp’s Edge is a group exhibition featuring the work of Ayanna Dozier, Won Ju Lim, Irini Miga, and Josh Rondeau. Partially nestled within a Chinese kitchen supply store, the show considers our relationships to space through a survey of paranoia and surveillance that continually asks, "do you know what to do?"
53 Orchard Street offers a nuanced approach to viewership within an institution. The forward facing gallery presents as a raised storefront, with floor to ceiling windows that open outwards towards the street. A step up into the space positions the viewer above the pedestrians below them. As if entering a stage, the viewer becomes the performer, as on display themselves as the work they intend to view. When the gallery is closed, the glass doors are locked and the exhibition becomes accessible only by peering in after-hours. This exhibition space shares a wall with a second, interior gallery. To access this, you must know, or be told, to enter a door to the neighboring Chinese kitchen supply store. Almost ‘speakeasy’ in its knowability, the anxiety of this structure provokes an air of suspense and relief as the viewer stumbles their way through rows of pots and pans into the gallery.
The architecture of the space prevents passive viewership in a way that each of the artists in Ramp’s Edge engages with. Ayanna Dozier’s film, Nightwalker, navigates the dramas of surveillance by moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen. These works position the camera as witness to draw attention to how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator.
Themes of privacy and paranoia continue in Won Ju Lim’s careful placement of works nestled within the confines of the gallery. Her aptly titled sculpture, Corner, is presented in its third iteration as a white model house that abuts an exposed wall of the gallery and hints at an interior space beyond the studs. Wrapped around two adjoining walls is her single-channel video projection, Endoscopy. This intrusive and claustrophobic probing examines the interactions of real and imaginary space to find the lie.
The use of institutional space to denote the changes that occur in and around them is achieved in Lim’s practice as well as within Irini Miga’s light-handed interventions. Her works capture the aesthetic conditions of that which often disappears in plain sight: a single fingerprint of the artists pointer finger, a refraction of a space as an accidental mark on the wall. The labor and attention required to create these easily dismissible items weighs counter to the humbleness of each work’s first impression. In reverberation of an unstable time, these micro- interventions highlight the unfixed nature of appearances to those who pay close attention.