PRESS RELEASE

WHAT THE HOUSE DREAMS OF
CASSIDY ARGO AND ATHENA PARELLA
OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 30, 2025 

Ruby/Dakota is overjoyed to announce What the House Dreams Of, a two-person show of brand new works by Cassidy Argo and Athena Parella. 

This house has good bones. Our windows illuminate the inner furnishings we inherited, the ones our mothers inherited before us. Works by Cassidy Argo play joyfully on our familiarity, on good-faith aesthetics. Parella’s work traverses the ‘gaps and impasses’ in which what is withheld in the mundane, nonthreatening, and familiar reveals itself, slowly. 

Many misunderstand the uncanny. The unheimlich may only exist via the heimlich of ‘familiar.’ This house is familiar, but what is it holding? Who is it hiding? 

It ought to have remained in the closet. We warned you once, and then twice. Argo and Parella’s work unearths the impenetrable and brings us through the closed loop of the familiar to the unfamiliar, and back again. Through the socialization of girlhood and good behavior we arrive at a womanhood riddled with spiderwebs and secrets. Through this singular curation, a skeleton key of sorts emerges. 

Through small scale painting and drawing, the show references tiny portals to nowhere, the bodily language of architecture, and Mark Fisher’s theory of the Weird and the Eerie. Athena Parella’s showstopper “Bedtime Story” poses charcoal, typically semi-ephemeral, as tangible, bold, and striking. 

Argo’s paint handling is akin to the moment before you pass out. It captures the blip in time before a loss of consciousness, when the unconscious asserts itself for once. 

Further still, Eva HD in her poem Bone Dog references a quieter “tide,” leaving home in pursuit of completeness, returning to the body with a “wife-shaped loneliness,” watching salt move via osmosis, longing for everything you have just witnessed, comparing the home and the body to the sun, rising and setting like a “tired whore,” a “stanza of worry” etched in your forehead. 

Desire and its object are one and the same. 

There is no Final Girl here. There are simply two women, navigating the closed loop between doing and being undonE.

Please join us at the gallery OCT 23 for an Opening Reception, 6-8PM