Clocking In, Clocking Out, is the culminating exhibition of the 2025 NYC-Based Artist Residency (NYCBAR) program, on view from June 12 to July 2, 2025 at All Street Gallery. Curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone, the exhibition features new work by Ayanna Dozier, Bat-Ami Rivlin, fields harrington, and Cato Ouyang, developed during their three-month residency at RU.

Spanning sculpture, photography, and ethnographic research, the selected artists zero in on the forces shaping contemporary work—from planned obsolescence to sex work and the gig economy—alongside corresponding narratives of mobility and confinement. Their practices examine how labor becomes visible, legible, and contested across bodies, infrastructures, and temporal scales.

Collectively, the projects by the four artists on view at All Street Gallery interrogate the ways labor and agency intersect with history, materiality, the body, and public space. By centering the experiences of those who labor at society’s margins, Dozier, Rivlin, harrington, and Ouyang challenge audiences to reconsider the structures that define work, visibility, and autonomy in contemporary life.

Ayanna Dozier’s ongoing Fear of Public Sex(ual Dissent) convenes a research group of sex workers and scholars to analyze ethnographic materials and media by sex worker grassroots organizations, bringing their insights to the public through film programming. Dozier’s work critiques the surveillance and displacement of sex workers, particularly Black femme sex workers, exposing how their marginalization signals broader societal threats to freedom and agency. Her time-based performance-films use her body in dialogue with members of the community to consider and remind audiences of sex worker histories within the landscapes of urban redevelopment, challenging the erasure imposed by modernization.

Bat-Ami Rivlin interrogates the politics of function and materiality by repurposing found objects into sculptural installations. From deflated kayaks bound by zip ties to truck tires encircling a fountain, Bat-Ami’s assemblages reveal patterns of utility that stem from the objects and spaces we occupy. By recognizing the function of these ready-made objects, Rivlin’s works point to systems of regulation, leisure, and class. The installations make visible narratives of social and economic categorization embedded within material culture. By sourcing materials locally, each work speaks to its specific environment, embodying an ecology of use and refuse.

fields harrington dissects the overlapping forces embedded in the gig economy by examining New York City’s delivery workforce alongside corresponding politics of extraction and exhaustion that plague both people and the planet. Lithium-ion batteries, which power e-bikes, depend on rare earth minerals essential to electronic devices, vehicles, and even weapons. Though these minerals are abundant worldwide, China controls about 70% of their production and 90% of their processing, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency. harrington notes that this monopoly underscores the connection between global extraction networks and extreme urban labor practices. His photographs of e-bicycles used by delivery workers further relay these machines as extensions of the workers themselves, symbolizing the upper limits of human functioning within a system of global exploitation linked through continuous extraction of time, labor, and materials. Urban infrastructures and algorithmic management dictate the rhythms of contemporary labor, which harrington incorporates into installations that employ DIY aesthetics to explore resourcefulness, precarity, and resistance.

Cato Ouyang’s ongoing project Kinds of Distance bridges historical and contemporary narratives of mobility, agency, and invisibility through a research-based, multimedia approach. Documenting their 500-mile pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, Cato’s work juxtaposes their own lived experiences alongside the medieval tradition of anchorites—women who walled themselves into churches as a form of chosen isolation—with the 1975 occupation of the Church of Saint-Nizier by sex workers protesting systemic violence. Through sculpture, film, and performance, Cato weaves a three-way metaphor that correlates urban water systems as sites of darkness, possibility, and movement, the contribution of sex workers who live in the underbelly of society while upholding its relational structures through invisibilized erotic labor, and the immaterial faith that illuminates the darkness of the anchorite cell.