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

Claro is also included in Greater New York, the major survey exhibition at MoMA PS1 that is on view until August 19. 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 describes the outer boroughs as a kind of “middle world,” a space that feels neither fully central nor peripheral, at once familiar and strangely indeterminate. Everyday locations—parks, residential streets, bridges, and vacant lots—become stages on which subtle narratives unfold. Many of the photographs are shaped through reenactment or the careful construction of situations, allowing the artist to transform ordinary places into psychologically charged spaces. The images feel suspended in an ambiguous timeframe: clothing, architecture, and lighting resist clear historical markers, suggesting scenes that could belong equally to the recent past and the present.

In Claro’s photographs, the fading glow of New York City’s sodium-vapor street lamps plays a central role. Once common and now largely replaced by bright LED lighting, their amber cast evokes a city just before the full optimization of surveillance infrastructure. Within these scenes, elements of the built environment—lighting systems, bridges, rail lines, and municipal structures—emerge as active presences. Parks that once facilitated leisure and chance encounters appear empty and uncertain, while infrastructure recedes quietly yet insistently, suggesting the political and economic forces that shape the city. The built environment functions as both setting and symbol, reflecting the tensions of contemporary urban life.