Alexis Dahan Turns Two Rams Gallery Inside Out…

On Sunday, the artist Alexis Dahan opened his solo exhibition “Alarm!” at New York’s Two Rams gallery—and on the streets of the Lower East Side. Exploring the themes of temporality, obsolescence, and space, Dahan brought the outside into the gallery, and the gallery to the sidewalk. Inside, viewers can perch upon a chair made from old pay phones and look out onto a street mural made by the artist Olaf Breuning. A series of stones with blue dots at the center have been installed on the interior walls—a nod to the man-made puddle Dahan dyed the same hue on a nearby corner. (You can see it from inside the gallery.) And most noticeably, an old fire department alarm box standing across the street has been painted a red to look like fluorescent mirage in the gray snow of February. “The fire department gave me permission to keep it red for the duration of the show,” Dahan explains. “And the blue puddle needs maintenance every couple of hours. And the mural walls keep getting vandalized. I guess it’s the nature of the street to constantly erode with time.”