Michelle Ramin's Finish Your Collapse and Stay for Breakfast will be the second show in our newly designated exhibitions space, The Office, in which we are hosting a series of month long exhibitions of work by invited, unrepresented artists in the region. Ramin’s paintings explore the contemporary phenomenon of ruin tourism. During her recent travels to Athens, Greece, Michelle witnessed first-hand the layered complexities of visiting ancient sites, where the gravity of the history is mixed with the current state of politics. Her watercolors reveal a cautionary tale of empires that have ultimately fallen, only to be swarmed by fanny packs and selfie sticks centuries later. In 2012 she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and was awarded the Goldie Award for Excellence for Visual Art in 2014 by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
In a suite of watercolor paintings on paper, all from 2017, Ramin addresses the phenomena of tourism and “ruin porn,” both of which she thought about a lot during a recent trip to Greece. In works such as Waiting on Democracy and the (again) hilariously titled Take it with the Caryatids! tourists line up to snap selfies at the Acropolis.