Inside / Outside - Opening Reception

Opening Reception Friday, June 26, 2026 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM Stephen Daiter Gallery 230 W. Superior Street Floor 4 Chicago, IL 60654 "Inside / Outside" will be on view June 23 through September 4, 2026. Free and open to the public. Stephen Daiter Gallery is pleased to present Inside / Outside, an exhibition of photographs by Clarissa Bonet and Lynne Cohen. Bringing together two photographic practices across generations, the exhibition examines how constructed environments shape human behavior, perception, and psychological experience. Though working in different contexts, Bonet constructs images of the city while Cohen photographs found institutional and domestic interiors. Together, they reveal how architecture and spatial organization structure everyday life, from the visible choreography of urban space to the more concealed systems embedded within institutional design. Clarissa Bonet’s City Space series addresses the contemporary urban landscape. Combining elements of street photography and constructed imagery, Bonet explores anonymity, surveillance, isolation, and the recent experience of moving through the modern city. Drawing on photography’s intrinsic relationship to light, she uses stark sunlight to transform ordinary streets into charged spaces where figures appear both hyper-visible and detached from their surroundings. Through carefully staged compositions, her photographs consider how urban planning and architecture shape not only movement through space, but emotional and social experience as well. Lynne Cohen’s large-scale photographs made in the 1980s and early 1990s depict interiors including classrooms, laboratories, offices, training facilities, shooting ranges and domestic spaces that appear at once familiar and strange. Working in black and white and notably absent of human figures, Cohen transforms these found environments into uncanny scenes evocative of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades”. Her compositions emphasize the artificial order of these spaces, revealing systems of organization, surveillance, and control embedded within architecture and design. Simultaneously humorous and unsettling, Cohen’s photographs expose the social and cultural artifice of institutional culture through spaces that feel suspended outside of time. Clarissa Bonet (b. 1986) is a Chicago-based artist whose work explores the psychological and physical dimensions of the built environment. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Aperture Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and is held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Lynne Cohen (1944–2014) was born in Racine, Wisconsin and developed an extensive internationally recognized photographic practice centered on institutional and domestic interiors. Her work is held in most major museums and includes exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, International Center of Photography, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Over the past fifteen years, major survey exhibitions of Cohen's work have been presented at Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Scotiabank in Toronto, each accompanied by a publication. Together, Bonet and Cohen present complementary visions of the built environment, examining how it shapes daily experience. Inside / Outside invites viewers to reconsider the spaces they inhabit and how those spaces influence the ways we see, move, and relate to one another. For press inquiries, images, or additional information, please contact Stephen Daiter Gallery at [email protected].

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