Amy Ritter: Behind a Hedge – a W2S 2017 exhibition

Opening Reception: Friday, March 31, 5:30 – 8:00 P.M.
The Artist Talks: Amy Ritter in the Main Gallery, 7:00 P.M.
The Artist Talks: John Dickinson in the Euclid Avenue Gallery, 6:15 P.M.

Amy Ritter says, “My work is an exploration of my relationship to my physical self vis-à-vis mobile homes and their interior landscapes. It stages my memories of my experience of growing up in a mobile home community in Eastern Pennsylvania—a place I’ve left but still feel rooted to.”

“Mobile home neighborhoods build and decay simultaneously; one day there is a house and the next an empty lot with cinder blocks and debris. Xerox prints, plywood, and cinder blocks are materials that have been essential to my practice. These materials relate back to makeshift homes with their cheap construction and quick fixes. The photographic plywood cutouts are sculptural canvases onto which my memories of mobile home life are projected. They turn three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, rendering what was once soft rigid, changing the function and reality of these objects. Placed in space, they recreate a ‘memoryscape’ the viewer is invited to enter, even though, as two-dimensional objects, they continue to resist contact and remain inaccessible to visitors—a reflection of my own changing relationship to these spaces.”

“I use self-portraiture to build a landscape that suggests traditional representations of the female body in western visual culture and challenges the meaning of that body. I use my gaze to make contact with the viewer. I efface the body of its breasts, and pubic region in some instances, to assume an androgynous appearance. In this way I’m also questioning gender and what it means to be a woman.”

Amy Ritter (b.1986) is a Brooklyn- based artist. Ritter’s work is an exploration of her relationship to her physical self vis-à-vis mobile homes and their interior landscapes. It stages her memories of her experience of growing up in a mobile home community—a place she’s left but still feels rooted to. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, and her MFA from The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Ritter’s solo exhibitions include Here | There at Arlington Arts Center (2016) and upcoming solo exhibitions at the Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA (2017) and Gravy Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2017). She was a finalist for the Print Center’s 89th annual International competition (2015), a recipient of Smack Mellon’s Hot Picks List, NY (2016), and has received numerous residencies including a full fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2015), Fine Arts Work Center fellowship (2015-2016), a MiXER residency at D’ Clinic, Zalaegerszeg, Hungary (2015), and a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016).

Amy Ritter, currently an artist-in-residence in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program (Lmcc.net ), is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery.

Amy Ritter CV March 2017
Slider Photos by Jacob Koestler