Donald Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs by Devlin Claro (b. 1995), opening Wednesday, April 30. The exhibition will present an entirely new body of work, including several large-format photographs that mark an expansion of the artist’s practice.

Claro will also be included in Greater New York, the major survey exhibition at MoMA PS1 opening April 16. Organized every five years, Greater New York brings together artists living and working in the New York metropolitan area and has long served as an important platform for emerging artists.

Born in Queens in 1995, Claro treats the borough as a microcosm of the continually evolving American landscape. Working primarily from his home darkroom in Flushing, he constructs carefully staged photographs that register the defining tensions of the present moment: the expansion of the surveillance state in the decades following September 11, the acceleration of internet-mediated life, and the cycles of economic boom and instability that shape the city.

Claro often describes the outer boroughs as a kind of “middle world,” a space that feels neither fully central nor peripheral, both familiar and strangely indeterminate. Within this environment, everyday locations—parks, residential streets, bridges, and vacant lots—become stages on which subtle narratives unfold. Many of the photographs emerge through reenactment or the construction of carefully arranged situations, allowing the artist to transform ordinary places into charged psychological spaces.

The photographs often appear suspended in an ambiguous timeframe. Clothing, architecture, and lighting resist clear historical markers, producing a sense that the scenes could belong simultaneously to the recent past and the present moment.

In many of Claro’s photographs, the fading glow of New York City’s sodium-vapor streetlamps plays an important role. Once common throughout the city and now largely replaced by bright LED lighting, these amber-lit environments evoke the atmosphere of a city just before the full optimization of surveillance infrastructure. In these scenes, elements of the built environment—lighting systems, bridges, rail lines, and municipal structures—become central actors within the images. Parks that once facilitated leisure and chance encounters appear empty and uncertain, while infrastructure looms quietly in the background, suggesting the political and economic forces that shape the city. The built environment becomes both a setting and a symbolic presence, reflecting the tensions of contemporary urban life.

The exhibition at Donald Ryan Gallery will present several new works that expand Claro’s engagement with scale and atmosphere. Larger formats intensify the cinematic quality of the images, drawing viewers more fully into environments where landscape, infrastructure, and human presence subtly register the psychological and political conditions of contemporary America.