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New Yorkers rush past bodegas, take-out joints and dry cleaners a hundred times a week without really seeing them. But at "Pedestrian," the new exhibition by Brooklyn artist Charis Ammon at Sargent’s Daughters in Tribeca, those everyday facades get the kind of attention usually reserved for landmarks. A few of the paintings stretch nearly eight-by-twelve feet—almost the size of the storefronts themselves—so there’s no chance of treating them like background noise.
Ammon, who lives in Bushwick, has spent years thinking about what you notice when you move through a city on foot. Her first solo show was all about Houston’s sidewalks and underpasses, imparting a sensibility that stayed with her.
“I was thinking a lot about the rhythm of your footsteps and this sort of meditative nature of going on a walk,” Ammon told Time Out. “Even though you’re in a public space, there’s the private mind.”
That mix of public and private and inner and outer inspires the scenes she returns to again and again.
She often photographs a storefront for months, sometimes years, waiting for the right moment. A thrift store near her apartment became a long-term muse.
“I’ve walked by that place for over two years, taking pictures,” she said.
Then, one partly cloudy afternoon, the window caught “a little pizza slice of sky,” framed by houseplants inside and the elevated J line behind it. Suddenly, the scene felt different, as the plants, the sky and the train all folded into one moment.
Other works lean into what Ammon calls “disruption,” like Bodega Melt, the Bushwick shop with the flickering LED watermelon sign. “Disruption in a window or on a surface speaks to story,” she said. To her, those breaks, in the form of a shadow, a reflection or a smear of light, mirror the moments that interrupt our own routines and the ones that make us pay attention.
The show’s title isn’t just about walking but about sharing the same ground-level view of the city. “Everyone is a body that has to get from one place to the next,” she said. “I like that as an egalitarian way of thinking.”
Her hope is simple: that seeing these massive paintings will nudge people into noticing the real storefronts they pass every day. “If someone gets two to five minutes of present-mindedness, that’s beautiful,” she said.
"Pedestrian" runs December 12–January 24 at Sargent’s Daughters in Tribeca.
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