Claire Dunn

Roll Up Project is pleased to present La gran posibilidad, a new installation by Claire Dunn, who works across photography, painting, and textiles. Dunn transforms the gallery’s windows into portals where memory, matter, and light converge. The project extends her ongoing exploration of the body as an archive and of landscapes—both natural and urban—as sites where personal histories are inscribed and reimagined.

In the Harrison Street window, the artist presents large-scale photograms printed on vinyl and fabric, their surfaces carved and marked to evoke constellations. The image intertwines macro-photographic traces of soil, tree bark, and moss with painted gestures and impressions of the artist’s own body—hair, saliva, fingerprints—entangling the micro and macro cosmos. Red photographic fragments punctuate these images like portals of memory, hovering over the black photogram. These works capture personal traces—memories embedded in photographs, vegetal fragments—alongside the material residues of place.

In the Third Street window, Dunn continues this dialogue between the intimate and the surrounding environment. A sequence of photograms created in darkrooms in both California and Buenos Aires reflects her experience of migration across hemispheres, languages, and cultures. For Dunn, the darkroom is not merely a technical space but also a psychic one: a site where memory emerges as a latent image, surfacing through layers of time and matter.

The title, La gran posibilidad (the great possibility), points to the instability of identity and belonging. Dunn’s works function as thresholds—between past and present, body and landscape, the intimate and the collective. Installed in Roll Up Project’s street-facing windows, they invite chance encounters with the public, asking what traces we leave in the world and how matter itself can carry memory.

Text written by Manuel Maquirriain, guest curator.

About the artist
Claire Dunn is an artist, psychologist, and educator who lives and works between California and Buenos Aires. Born and raised in Argentina, she earned her BA in Psychology from Universidad del Salvador and her MFA from California College of the Arts, where she received the Dennis Leon and Christin Nelson Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Minnesota Street Project, MOCA Los Angeles, the Argentine Embassy in Washington DC, Pinta BA Photo, and the SFO Museum, among others. She has participated in residencies at Recology AIR (San Francisco), Monson Arts (Maine), and La Flecha del Arte (Argentina).

Learn more about her work at https://www.clairedunn.org/

Learn more about guest curator Manuel Maquirriain on Instagram at: @manumaquirriain