THE ARMORY SHOW, 2025: Ally Rosenberg

For The Armory Show 2025, Dio Horia will present Fine Specimens, a solo booth by Ally

Rosenberg, reflecting on how the act of observing changes what is observed. The exhibition

posits that consciousness is not a reliable window to the world but fragile, looped and

embodied. An oily ram horn is cushioned by a grid of calcified bubblewrap panels and a

bundle of dangling tassels convulse in spermatic confusion. Two tiled pillows each cradle a

gleaming ear-shell hybrid (Piercing Fearlobes), literalising the concept of umwelt: the notion,

originating from ethology, that each organism inhabits a unique perceptual world, shaped by

its sensory modalities and cognitive apparatus. The shell does not transmit the ocean or the

sound of footsteps in the night, only the echo of one’s own pulse in the spiralled chambers

of your ear canal. His work strives at a cognitive tension between a lascivious materiality - a

‘finish fetish’ - and an unforgiving scrutiny of the self.

At the centre stands a hand-sculpted washing machine, indiscreetly gift-wrapped in

painstakingly-modelled, iridescent snakeskin. It anchors two, patinated, copper-pipe chains

that attach a serpent head and tail to either side. In a cartoon logic, the appliance becomes

part of the snake’s anatomy - its bulging door is itself a belly; pregnant or swollen with

gluttony, churning with angst. Titled Rinse and Spin, it plays on the the ouroboros - the snake

that eats its own tail - and how grand, mythic imagery cycles through our collective

consciousness, into the humdrum of the domestic. The Jungian idea of the ouroboric snake

is one of integration of psychological opposites, where holding the tension of mental

contradictions is the path to individuation. Rinse and Spin, however, is an allegory of ego and

disintegration. The psychological laundering that allows violence and moral outrage to enter

the mundane.

Through this immersive presentation, Fine Specimens invites viewers to sit uncomfortably in

the contradictions of our time and observe how introspection and self-construction are

always filtered through the limitations—and particularities—of one’s embodied vantage

point.

Throughout his practise, Rosenberg’s work delves into the intricacies of human cognition,

drawing from his background in neuroscience. His practice often invokes personal history,

shaped by a traditional religious upbringing and formative experiences with sexual identity,

using the mythology of memory as an unreliable narrative framework for constructing a

sense of self. At the core of his work is an engagement with consciousness as an emergent

property of physical matter, a theme that permeates his explorations of perception and

identity. Through techniques such as slicing, casting, and modelling, Rosenberg employs a

visual language that combines archetypal imagery and a hypersensitive materiality. The

interplay between familiar materials and bodily forms becomes a means of articulating the

conflicts inherent in sentient experience.