Alexander DiJulio is pleased to present Charis Ammon’s first New York solo exhibition, Where Do You Go When You Are On Your Way?. Featuring a selection of small paintings based on Ammon’s observations of the people and places she sees on her daily commute through urban landscapes, the show highlights moments and settings often overlooked or simply glimpsed and not dwelled upon—highway overpass flora or sidewalk graffiti or a view through a laundromat window. Through unctuous brushwork, direct painted wet-on-wet in oils, Ammon deftly extracts beauty from the seemingly mundane. 
 
While Ammon’s studio practice incorporates works on both macro and micro scales, Where Do You Go When You Are On Your Way? derives intimacy from the diminutive size of her canvases. The works, which are merely 8x10 inches at their largest invite the viewer in for a closer view….no, even closer than that. In moving from work to work, the feeling of walking through a city (New York as it were, but it could really be anywhere) in a near reverie emerges through quick flashes. Be it a downward glance at the ankles of a pedestrian in front of you as in Shadow Beat, or the wet sidewalk cement tags in Birdsongs in Brooklyn or the skyward gazes through scaffolding as with Morning Sun, we are confronted with the innocuous impressions that quietly and collectively make up our understanding of urban life. Ammon has an almost Hopper-like ability to make paintings that seem as if they’ve always existed but through a direct painting application that emphasizes painterly marks over any kind of photographic realism.
 
Charis Ammon was born in 1992 in Dallas, TX and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Ammon graduated from Texas State University with a BFA in Painting, and she completed her MFA in Painting at The University of Houston in May 2018. Ammon's solo exhibitions include Palm Trees and City Debris, Texas State University Gallery, San Marcos, TX (2022), Inheritance at The Old Jail Art Center, Albany, TX (2020), and Maintenance at Art League Houston (2019), as well as two solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery (2021, 2018). Her work was recently included in Urban Impressions: Experiencing the Global Contemporary Metropolis, Moody Center For the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2022), The Big Show, Lawndale Art Center, Houston (2022) and in Shh at Alexander DiJulio in NYC. An artist book is included in an upcoming survey of book arts at The Printing Museum, Houston.