Chapter NY is pleased to present an exhibition by Autumn Ramsey. This will be Ramsey’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Ramsey’s practice addresses the construction of social identity and difference – specifically the cultural inclination to look at the surface of things, often without consideration for what lies beyond that which is immediately seen. Her work plays with logic in a way that supports communicative language while also deeply subverting it. In both scenarios she asks viewers to follow seemingly innocuous, even ridiculous, signs into a realm of circumstances that challenge common beliefs and examine bias. In the process, she reveals the deeper character of her practice.

For much of Western history, the body, especially the female body, has been conceptualized as simply one more object among others, something that is part of the physical world but not entirely rational – a source of disruption that needs to be controlled. This social construction of difference correlates to ideas of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation that Ramsey uses to explore not only the role of the individual in shaping the situation, but also the situation’s role in shaping the individual.

In each of Ramsey’s previous exhibitions, her work has consistently addressed cultural and psychological issues through the open expression of emotion, often framed by art historical and mythological analogies. This exhibition in particular may also be seen as biographical, addressing transition in all of its complexity – from the euphoric empowerment of a mythological totem in Psyche (2012), to the loss and release of Dead (2016), to the catharsis, terror and freedom that change can bring in Unresolved Hawk (2018). The range of expressions is powerful, and while each expression is fully realized, it is the space between them that is the subject of Ramsey’s work. This exhibition embodies the way in which we define ourselves through a range of understandings that together begins to address the expression of a complete and individual life. The result is a seductive array of expressions that convey ideas of desire, ambivalence, life lived and celebrated as well as a sense of it consuming itself, a laconic image of mortality.

Autumn Ramsey (b. 1976) lives and works in Chicago. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Park View / Paul Soto, Brussels; Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris; Park View, Los Angeles; Lyles & King, New York; Tanya Leighton, Cologne; Bodega, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Night Club, Chicago; Actual Size, Los Angeles; Julius Caesar, Chicago; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn; and Rowley Kennerk Gallery, Chicago, among others.