Stephen Daiter Gallery presents Inside / Outside, an exhibition bringing together photographs by Clarissa Bonet and Lynne Cohen. Connecting the work of two artists from different generations, the exhibition considers the ways constructed spaces affect human movement, perception, and emotional experience.
While their approaches differ, Bonet creates carefully composed images within the urban landscape, whereas Cohen turns her attention to existing institutional and domestic interiors. Seen together, their photographs demonstrate how architecture and spatial design influence daily life, from the visible patterns of movement within the city to the less apparent structures of order and authority contained within interior spaces.
Clarissa Bonet’s City Space series focuses on the contemporary experience of the urban environment. Moving between street photography and deliberately constructed scenes, Bonet investigates themes of anonymity, observation, solitude, and the complex act of navigating the modern city.
Light plays a central role in these photographs. Strong sunlight reshapes familiar streets into dramatic settings in which individuals appear intensely exposed yet psychologically separated from the spaces around them. Through precise staging and composition, Bonet examines how architecture and urban planning determine physical movement while also influencing social relationships and emotional states.
Lynne Cohen’s large-scale photographs from the 1980s and early 1990s portray classrooms, laboratories, offices, training centres, shooting ranges, and domestic rooms that seem both recognizable and deeply unfamiliar.
Created in black and white and almost entirely devoid of people, these photographs transform real interiors into strange and ambiguous settings that recall Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Cohen draws attention to the rigid arrangement of objects and surfaces, revealing the systems of discipline, observation, and control expressed through architecture and design.
At once humorous and disturbing, her images expose the constructed nature of institutional culture. The rooms appear carefully prepared for human activity, yet their emptiness gives them an atmosphere of suspension, as though they exist beyond any specific moment in time.
Together, Bonet and Cohen offer two distinct yet closely connected perspectives on the built environment and its influence on everyday experience. Inside / Outside encourages viewers to look again at the spaces they occupy and to consider how those environments shape the ways people observe, move, behave, and interact with one another.

About the Authors

Clarissa Bonet, born in 1986, is an artist based in Chicago whose work explores the physical and psychological effects of the built environment. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Aperture Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Her work is also represented in numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago