NEW YORK, NY.- Sargent’s Daughters is presenting Pedestrian, Charis Ammon’s (b. 1992, Dallas, TX) second exhibition with the gallery. Based in Brooklyn, Ammon produces observational paintings drawn from photographs taken during her daily wanderings. Her work captures traces of shared narratives in spaces that most overlook, asking viewers to slow down and look closely at the world around them. In this new body of work, Ammon focuses her gaze on the sidewalks of New York and its omnipresent storefronts — Chinese takeout restaurants, bodegas, dry cleaners, flower shops, and bars.

The show’s title, Pedestrian, invokes this movement through the city, but also reflects the way these types of spaces are considered unimportant or below notice. Yet for Ammon, the sidewalk serves as “a great equalizer,” a space that everyone regardless of background has to navigate. She writes, “To me, ‘pedestrian’ subject matter holds a power of reflection—a reality of equal terms. In human history, we’ve created hierarchies and financial systems to rank each other, but we all are still a body that needs to move from point A to point B.” By painting the reality of the way we live and move through space, she reveals how the specific details of these places transform the ubiquitous into something uniquely familiar, suggesting a shared experience and level of access.

The pedestrian point of view was central to the development of modern art in the nineteenth century, as the Parisian flâneur wandered the city, documenting scenes of everyday life. An appreciation for the quotidian and the unremarkable was central to setting movements like Realism, Impressionism, and even Cubism apart from their forebearers. In the mid-twentieth century, this concept was picked up by Situationists like Guy Débord, whose concept of the dérive suggested that unplanned wandering of the city, guided by desire and observation, could be a means of escaping the alienation and control of modern life.

Ammon’s work engages with this art historical and theoretical tradition by capturing the lived textures of urban space through painterly brushstrokes. However, her work goes further and locates the viewer of her work on the sidewalk with her, in a shared public space. Ammon is preoccupied by what can and cannot be seen from the street – the disruptions created by the reflection of light across glass or plastic, the shadows cutting across a sign, the darkness in the back of a space. The viewer joins in her observations and interests, navigating the spaces she creates.

Ammon’s small works replicate the sensation of a snapshot, while her large paintings are nearly to scale with the storefronts she depicts. In these monumental compositions, multiple individual canvas panels are each a window into the stores. Though painting has long been described as a window, Ammon takes that literally and captures the distortions and reflections produced by glass. The viewer is reminded that they are outside looking in, unable to access a single clear image, catching only glimpses of the worlds that exist behind security gates and neon text. Yet the intense specificity of these spaces allows for points of connection between the viewer and the image, offering alternate paths toward a shared reality. For Ammon, vision is always fallible and contextual, and this is what makes the act of looking so interesting.

Charis Ammon (b. 1992, Dallas, TX) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work captures the dynamic essence of urban life. Ammon received her BFA in Painting from Texas State University in 2015, followed by an MFA in Painting from The University of Houston in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY); Alexander DiJulio (New York, NY); Texas State University Gallery (San Marcos, TX), The Old Jail Art Center (Albany, TX); and Art League Houston (Houston, TX); and Inman Gallery (Houston, TX). Her work was recently exhibited in group exhibitions at Fireplace Project (East Hampton, NY); Moody Center For the Arts at Rice University, (Houston, TX); and Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), amongst others. Her artist book, Rhythm, was included in a survey of book arts at The Printing Museum, Houston (2023). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, TX).