Love How Your Windows Glisten

Julian Adon Alexander, Anthony Coleman, Choichun Leung, and Hakeem Olayinka.

Curated by Nakai Falcón

Jan 18, 2025 — Feb 22, 2025

Opening Saturday, January 18, 2025 from 5-7 pm

52 Allen St.

The portrait functions as an avenue for viewers to peer into lives outside of their own, alluding to more covert details tied to the subject’s experiences. This act of looking and reflection is a transference of perceptive energy between personal exteriors and interiors where impressions are capable of impacting us, long after the initial encounter. Love How Your Windows Glisten explores properties of the portrait, examining how formalized and undone iterations within portraiture not only establish sites of remembrance, but also suggest notions of community and refuge through connectivity. Here, the artists engage in an intergenerational dialogue depicting profiles that blur boundaries concerning the real, fictional, and temporal. Underscoring influences derived out of childhood and upbringing’s effect on intersubjectivity concerning the figure.

Anthony Coleman’s approach comprises a self-made lexicon of figural symbols dedicated to reimaginings. Inspired by the unbound nature of graffiti growing up in Philadelphia, the artist’s work mulls over nostalgic material and pop cultural icons. As plenty of these names appear in noteable media like Wonder Woman and Heithcliff, they are reintroduced to us with Coleman’s signature use of the lineand occasional antennae sprouting out the top of a head, creating a hive of “Coleman-izens” as though they were from another universe. The summoning of these playful creatures suggests a warm radiance and comfort, dually embracing the viewer in a slippage of familiarity.

Manga-styled illustrations outline Julian Adon Alexander’s hyper-realistic scenes coated in luminous graphite and muted darkness. His grounded compositions center around Black subjectivity’s depiction in suburban and cityscapes, collaging safe havens from personal experience that are meant to unburden the sitter with the weight of representation. Anime and video games references commonly appear as ethereal forces to serve metaphorical functions alluding to his protagonist’s feelings or circumstances. Either protectively watching over them or juxtaposing a subject’s state of being. Narrative cues in the form of speech bubbles lead the viewer to project onto the work when imagining if you could flip to the next page.

Mining her past from what she refers to as “memory clips”, as well as recording her subconscious journeys, Choichun Leung meditates on polarities between the self, the outer world, and catharsis. The protagonists of her drawings appear as heroines and totemic faces, often coming to one another’s aid with ferocious care. Similarly to the comic strips Leung grew up with, her graphic visuals employ dark humor when situating her girls in introspective scenes. Subjects often display resistance towards historical assumptions of expression, challenging the behavioral expectations growing up as Asian women. Her training as a Usui Reiki Master informs depictions of touch and action through her figuration to represent dualities of self-preservation and spiritual healing.

Focusing on versions of himself and other folks present in his life, Hakeem Olayinka prioritizes the nuances of Blackness by reflecting on shared conditions across different perspectives. Nodding to neo-expressionist traditions, the artist’s sensuous application of heavy paints galvanize his abstract approach to figuration, putting colorist gestures at the forefront. Bridging bright aesthetics from youth tied to cartoons and claymation that contrast duller feelings of worry and harshities of the unimaginary. Barriers are a common motif in Olayinka’s work, where opaque methods of concealing and sectioning establish a breakage within our line of sight. Imparting impressions of eyes and masks as portals that direct our attention to the features that are visible, prompting us to come to our own conclusions.