Palm Trees and City Debris is an exhibition of artworks created by Charis Ammon since she relocated to Houston in 2020. Ammon paints images that she encounters as she moves through her surroundings, many of them temporary scenes of destruction or rebuilding. Piles of concrete rubble and steel rebar, orange construction fencing and barricades, these fugitive signs of maintenance and development are permanent fixtures within the urban landscape. Ephemeral but also everywhere, these scenes mirror the fleeting nature of the artist's own encounter with the subjects, which she captures first as a photograph.
As I move past these public spaces, I carry my inner world with me, finding moments of connection with my surroundings as I walk. The weathering surfaces of American cities whisper stories of disrepair, resilience, and change. I see my story implicated in these spaces. These paintings are moments of empathy—when my environment gave me access to myself and a connection to my community.
Human figures are noticeably absent from the scenes that Ammon depicts. In the large-scale works, the viewer's own body is the figure therein, taking in the view before them at human scale, but at a distance. The small paintings, by contrast, necessitate that viewers come close. Ammon states, “the tenderness of my small paintings gives the feeling of being a part of intimate conversation, whereas the larger paintings give a sense of being enveloped yet excluded.”
The artist has recently begun painting images captured from Google Earth. The contrast between these aerial and the pedestrian views within the space of one exhibition requires a perspectival shift, an action that can be physical but is more often mental. Coupling a multiplicity of views in this way reminds the viewer that alternating between perspectives is critical to creating more holistic pictures of the world.
Ammon describes grappling with our collective struggle to resist the "cynicism and numbness" produced by troubling acts in our time. Palm trees, pink skies, turquoise pools—these softer moments in the work bring glimmers of levity to the exhibition’s darker questions: What are the consequences of a culture that builds a Funplex with an expansive empty parking lot, looking anything but fun?
Palm Trees and City Debris is the first exhibition to pair Ammon's paintings with three-dimensional elements. Like the debris rendered in her paintings, the found materials have lives to consider. She collects them—a broken windshield here, hunks of concrete there—as mementos or artifacts of the material's former utility.