Welcome to Li’l Wolf
Amy Ritter

GALLERY II

March 18–April 16, 2023

Opening reception: Saturday, March 18 from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Welcome to Li’l Wolf, a solo exhibition by 2022–2023 Fellow Amy Ritter. In this new series of works, consisting of video, sculpture, and photography, Ritter takes the visitor on a trip through the mobile home park where she grew up and where her parents continue to live. More directly, she explores her white working-class family’s experience living in a double-wide trailer and her father’s connection to the American Dream.

In 2015, Ritter created the MH Archive to document the forgotten and marginalized mobile home communities across the United States. Through meticulous documentation consisting of interviews, photography, recordings, and video, Ritter has gained a deeper understanding of the diverse world of manufactured housing. This ongoing process of visiting mobile home parks now brings her back to where her interests originated, Li’l Wolf, her parents’ mobile home community in eastern Pennsylvania. Using her father’s camcorder from the ’90s, she turns her focus inside her childhood home for the first time. She offers the audience a glimpse into her father’s life by investigating the spaces he inhabits.

When the visitor first steps into the gallery, they are confronted by Li’l Wolf 6, part of the artist’s ongoing MH Window Series. In this life-sized photograph, taken of a window at her parents’ home, Ritter captures the exterior of a world often guarded and hidden from society. Installed opposite the photograph is the video “Happy Birthday Dean.” Here, Ritter gives the viewer an intimate tour of the inside of her father’s home, culminating with footage from a recent birthday party. The celebration evokes feelings of nostalgia in her father and a yearning for his childhood—a time when things were easier for him. As his age has increased, so too have his fears and resistance to change, encapsulated by the fifteen-minute video Fear | Comfort, projected on the central wall.

The insecurities that haunt Ritter’s father flicker across the projector and TV screen. But, unlike the details of his home’s exterior, they remain partly hidden from view. The viewer is asked to project onto Ritter’s father their own baggage about the American Dream. Seen through his daughter’s lens, he becomes a window into the psyche of an entire generation, leaving us with the question: “How do we restore the dignity of those who get left behind?”

Amy Ritter grew up in the rural town of Orefield, located in Eastern Pennsylvania. For the past 7 years she’s documented mobile home parks (over 50 sites in over 17 states), and interviewed residents. She’s created and exhibited work influenced by these archives built on her own personal history growing up in a double-wide trailer. She’s continuing to visit mobile home parks throughout the United States, systematically archiving with overarching questions around the American Dream, specifically the myth of social mobility and the stigma around manufactured housing.

Ritter has shown her work nationally for over a decade. She’s been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships; selected honors include Fine Arts Work Center, MA (2016), Skowhegan, ME (2016), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Resident, NY (2017), a fellowship at Yaddo, NY (2020), an Engaging Artist Fellowship at More Art, NY (2021), among others. She received her MFA from Ohio State University (2014) and her BFA from Tyler School of Art (2009).

View the Press Release here.

View Amy Ritter’s page here.

Photography: Sebastian Bach