What the House Dreams Of

Ruby/Dakota is overjoyed to present What the House Dreams Of, a two-person show of brand new works by Cassidy Argo and Athena Parella. This house has good bones. Our windows illuminate the inner furnishings we inherited, the ones our mothers inherited before us. Works by Cassidy Argo play joyfully on our familiarity, on good-faith aesthetics. Parella's work traverses the ‘gaps and impasses' in which what is withheld in the mundane, nonthreatening, and familiar reveals itself, slowly. Many misunderstand the uncanny. The unheimlich may only exist via the heimlich of ‘familiar.' This house is familiar, but what is it holding? Who is it hiding? It ought to have remained in the closet. We warned you once, and then twice. Argo and Parella's work unearths the impenetrable and brings us through the closed loop of the familiar to the unfamiliar, and back again. Through the socialization of girlhood and good behavior we arrive at a womanhood riddled with spiderwebs and secrets. Through this singular curation, a skeleton key of sorts emerges. Through small scale painting and drawing, the show references tiny portals to nowhere, the bodily language of architecture, and Mark Fisher's theory of the Weird and the Eerie. Athena Parella's showstopper "Bedtime Story" poses charcoal, typically semi-ephemeral, as tangible, bold, and striking. Argo's paint handling is akin to the moment before you pass out. It captures the blip in time before a loss of consciousness, when the unconscious asserts itself for once. Further still, Eva HD in her poem Bone Dog references a quieter "tide," leaving home in pursuit of completeness, returning to the body with a "wife-shaped loneliness," watching salt move via osmosis, longing for everything you have just witnessed, comparing the home and the body to the sun, rising and setting like a "tired whore," a "stanza of worry" etched in your forehead. Desire and its object are one and the same. There is no Final Girl here. There are simply two women, navigating the closed loop between doing and being undone. Athena Parella (b. 1995) is an American artist living and working in New York. Raised in central Massachusetts on a busy road fenced against passing trucks, she and her siblings found both comfort and mystery in the hours after dark - when the streets quieted and the adults went to sleep. In place of people, furniture seemed to offer comfort, though she often wondered if those objects found comfort in her. Working in drawing and painting, her work explores memory and narrative through portrayals of urban/suburban experience - where houses, chairs, and figures exceed their domestic meanings. These inanimate presences carry memory, fear, and intimacy. In her recent work, this dynamic emerges in the image of a boy lying in a bed slightly too small, facing a chair turned toward him. The room suggests both protection and estrangement, as if comfort might be sought not only from family but from the mute attention of objects themselves. Cassidy Argo (b. 1999) is a figurative painter based in Providence, Rhode Island. She received her BFA in Fine Art from Moore College of Art & Design in 2021 and her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025. Argo's work has been showcased in notable venues, including Hollis Taggart (New York, NY), Gelman Gallery at the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), and InLiquid Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), among others. Her paintings are included in prominent collections, including the Green Family Art Foundation (Dallas, TX).

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155 E 2nd St

Downtown, NY