Exhibitions

We Are All Compost

2025-03-15 -> 2025-04-19

We Are All Compost is a group show of decomposing compositions of entanglement with the more-than-human world. Curated by William Schwaller, this exhibition brings together a diverse body of work by artists seeking symbiopoeisis with the environment, making with its critters and vibrant matter. Rooted in the materiality of the world around them, these artists embark on collaborations and entanglements with bacteria, composting insects, fungi, plants, soil, and stone in the composition of sculpture, painting, and video. Come celebrate generative decomposition at our exhibition opening on Saturday March 15 from 5 to 9 pm.

SHLTR

2025-02-01 -> 2025-03-08

SHLTR is a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Isaac Scott (curated by Maria Stracke). Exploring the notion of “shelter,” both noun and verb, as a responsive gesture, and an opportunity for reflection, Scott’s works take up the ruptures and failures of our current political and social contexts in order to reimagine our understanding of shelter and sheltering as a collective, transformative endeavor. Through self-portraiture, installation, text, and sculpture, the artist offers viewers a timely opportunity to reflect inward and outward, toward the past and into the future. Scott’s use of common building materials such as ceramic tiles, house paint, plywood, concrete, and rebar, imbues the mundane and familiar with fresh historical and cultural significance. By refashioning these materials into recognizable yet visually compelling objects - a flower, a hut, a billboard message - Scott presents several variations on the role shelter might take in reconfiguring systemic change. In Scott’s rendition, “shelter” symbolizes not merely a means of survival but a site for regeneration. Fissures, rough textures, and industrial materials remind us to embrace undoing and rebuilding. Discarded elements with purposefully fragmented and restructured ceramic pieces suggests the possibility of reunification within moments of destruction. Through both material and process, SHLTR amplifies the ongoing challenge of connecting disparate experiences and perspectives to create more inclusive and radical spaces for action.

THE SUBLIME IS MEOW: An exhibition of artist made cat toys

2024-10-26 -> 2024-12-07

“The avant-garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. The sense of The Sublime is the name of the dismantling.” -Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1984 Calling all miserable, childless cat lovers and their world-destroying comrades! The future is Feline and it is right fucking MEOW! Big Ramp is pleased to announce our invitational exhibition of artist-made cat toys with contributions by artists from around the country engaged in spectacle, serious play, concrete comedy, commodity fetishism, slacktivism, low-effort relational antagonism, high-effort readymades, detournement, domestic poetics, institutional cat-tique, post-internet cat-sthetics, spatial paw-etry, or capitalist purr-realism.

Aliento corporal/Corporeal Breath

2024-09-14 -> 2024-10-12

Aliento corporal/Corporeal Breath is a group show curated by Big Ramp member William Schwaller that explores the interstices of the body and the spiritual in contemporary artistic practices. At a moment in time when culture is as secular and materialistic as it has ever been, the artists and the work in this exhibition offer timely reminders of the millenary relationship between art and spirituality. While materialism and capitalism are certainly omnipresent forces that artists rightfully and variously reject, the artists in the show are also exploring the spiritual dimension of artistic practice itself or turning to the spiritual in order to reclaim ancestral knowledge and beliefs that colonization and displacement sought to eradicate. Skeptical of earlier, postmodern parody and satire levied against organized religions or the capitalistic marketing of spiritual lifestyles by influencers, the artists in this show present their own earnest visual languages of individual and collective spirituality.

Veil of Veronica

2024-07-20 -> 2024-08-24

Big Ramp is pleased to announce Veil of Veronica. A joint show of paintings by the artists Conor MacCormack and Lindsay Thomson. The Veil of Veronica often called simply the Veronica, is a Christian relic consisting of a piece of cloth said to bear an image of the Holy Face of Jesus produced by other than human means (an acheiropoieton, "made without hand"). Various existing images have been claimed to be the original relic, as well as early copies of it. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the name "Veronica" is a colloquial portmanteau of the Latin word 'vera', meaning "truth", and Greek 'eikon', meaning "image"; the Veil of Veronica was therefore largely regarded in medieval times as "the true image", and the truthful representation of Jesus, preceding the Shroud of Turin. Repetition and symbolization as tools for enlightenment and truth-seeking are crucial aspects of both Conor and Lindsay’s artistic practices. Both artists work in a range of mediums but primarily focus on painting and drawing. The works range in scale and in surface, from the body referential stretched canvases, to the collections of small works on paper. Using symbols, similar in form and function to those found in traditional depictions of Jesus, they are able to uncover the inherent paradox: the artistic act that feels both essential and somewhat futile, an effort marred by the impossibility of achieving true replication or understanding. The works in Veil of Veronica play with these clichés and confessions, navigating between them without seeking resolutions, allowing contradictions and layers to coexist and inform each other.

"The Magic of the Sun Playing with the Moon"

2024-05-11 -> 2024-06-22

BIG RAMP is pleased to announce “The Magic of the Sun Playing with the Moon”, curated by co-directors Alexandra Schoolman and Michelle Anne Harris. Call it what you will — science, the divine, synchronicity, magic — but there was a shared sense of awe this past April 8th in the northern hemisphere when for a maximum of four minutes and thirty seconds the light of the Sun was shielded from Earth by the Moon’s cratered surface. The perfection of proportion, the sun being 400 times bigger than the moon and 400 times further away, is equally impressive and daunting. BIG RAMP’s exhibition, opening six weeks after this celestial display, acknowledges how the two most important astronomical bodies to our planet also have a relationship with each other.

"Will You Share Rage with Me?"

2024-04-13 -> 2024-05-11

"Will You Share Rage with Me?" literally and figuratively explores what it is like to live in multiple places at once. Yaqeen Yamani’s recent body of work was designed for her final MFA thesis at Temple University. Featuring the piece "Disclaimers Prevent Me from Showing Work Here" installed at Temple Contemporary April 10-13th, the rest of her pieces will be on view at Big Ramp Philly and Information Space from April 13-May 11. After a fellow student installed a banner at Stella Elkins Gallery celebrating Puerto Rican and Palestinian solidarity in October 2023, Temple University began installing a disclaimer next to the work reading “Artwork on display at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture reflects the viewpoints of the credited artists and not necessarily the viewpoints of the school or Temple University.” The disclaimer is a poignant reminder to Palestinian and South-West Asian North African (SWANA) artists that cultural institutions have never been neutral or inclusive spaces. Yaqeen’s artwork, "Disclaimers Prevent Me from Showing Work Here", ironically does “reflect the viewpoints of the university” spotlighting how art spaces weaponize gallery text to control narratives of Black and Brown artists, whose existence can inherently call the institution’s politics into question. For Palestinian artist Yamani, the work responds to and interacts with the presence of disclaimers as a tool for censorship and reflects Yamani’s unwillingness to work in spaces that show no support for Palestinian resistance and freedom. Through the refusal to show the full thesis in Temple Contemporary and leave the allotted space empty, Yamani responds to the failure of art spaces and academic institutions to acknowledge Palestinian voices and leans into spaces of solidarity and support.

"Death Card"

2024-01-23 -> 2024-03-12

Big Ramp is pleased to announce our inaugural exhibition DEATH CARD, a curatorial collaboration with our neighbors and fellow gallerists at Information Space. Spanning both spaces (which share a party wall), the exhibition features the work of eight artists working in various types of object and image making, spilling into the two interiors with both frenetic fervor and quiet presence.