10.25 I Drilled a Hole and Stared at the sun - Opening reception

For Immediate Release:  

I Drilled a Hole and Stared at the Sun

Amanda Crain-Freeland - M. Fernanda Nuñez Alzate - Mika Obayashi - Heather Swenson

October 25 - November 22, 2025

Opening Reception 6-9pm 10/25/2025

BIG RAMP is thrilled to announce I Drilled a Hole and Stared at the Sun, a group exhibition by four Philadelphia artists: Amanda Crain-Freeland, M. Fernanda Nuñez Alzate, Mika Obayashi, and Heather Swenson.  These artists share an interest in the infinite potential for intimacy generated by fleeting moments, provisional materials, and vernacular architecture.  Each artist looks at the absurd yet poetic experience found in urban and industrial objects, while considering how to recognize and articulate the tensions that produced them.  

When looking at the built environment, certain structures seem to fall outside the logic of capitalism’s seductive veneer.  Broken or incomplete corners in public spaces marked with temporary repairs feel possessed by the marks of accidental interactions.  A wall outlet, layered with so many years of paint is rendered useless.  A stairway to nowhere still maintained by an unknown laborer.  These things, moments, spaces, show us a potential not apparent in that which appears complete.  (Insert Heidegger quote here…something about hammers).  The thing that breaks or is stuck in a state of becoming, shows us our desires differently, right?  

Mika Obayashi stacks, balances, folds, and suspends ordinary things as new arrangements, revealing the poetic potentials they occupy. Heather Swenson studies the ad-hoc problem solving found in vernacular architecture, creating miniatures as sculptural re-enactment of provisionality.  Amanda Crain-Freeland employs diagonal sciences to reveal failures and contradictions of our mediated environments.  And M. Fernanda Nuñez Alzate uses materials that welcome transformation such as wax, plant fibers and food matter, working to interfere with expected boundaries and orientations.

Beyond the surface of appearances is an indication that certain types of interaction/labor/creation can disregard function, so that desire peers beneath the surface.  Each artist asks in different ways: Is there a correlation between intimacy potentials and encounters with incompleteness?  When you encounter something broken or precarious, something folded not meant to be folded, something stacked not meant to be stacked, or something suspended with a tenuous relationship to gravity…is it desire or failure that makes it seem untethered to systems that seem now more clearly revealed?  

Bios

Amanda Crain-Freeland (b. 1994, Vancouver) lives and works in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture (2025), and BFA from Emily Carr University (2019). 

M (Maria Fernanda) Nuñez is a Colombian artist based in Philadelphia. They hold an MFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art. 

Mika Obayashi is a fiber and sculpture artist from Michigan. She earned her BA from Amherst College in 2019 and her MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture in 2025. She is currently serving as the West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné Papermill in Brooklyn. 

Heather Swenson is an artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture (2025), and a BFA from Purchase College of Art and Design (2012). Her work was recently shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, NY.