Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present North North South, the first New York City solo exhibition by visual artist Ayda Gragossian. Exploring the tension between visibility and erasure, her documentary images capture quotidian details of Los Angeles's sprawl as experienced on foot rather than by car, revealing moments that ordinarily escape attention. Drawing on Gragossian’s book of the same title, published by GOST in 2025, the exhibition highlights her visual narrative approach through the intimate closeness of vertically oriented images of working-class spaces in a city characterized by polarities of glamour and squalor. A poetic sensibility marks her urban portraiture, tracing humanity through rhythms of light and space shaped by an unseen populace.
Ayda Gragossian is an Iranian American visual artist based in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Photography and Painting from California State University Northridge and an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Her work, which addresses notions of displacement, impermanence and longing, has been featured in platforms such as 'Fotofilmic', 'Nowhere Diary', 'All Cities are Beautiful', and 'Another Place'.
