Love How Your Windows Glisten
Photos courtesy of Below Grand
Below Grand
52 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
January 18 - February 22, 2025
52 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
January 18 - February 22, 2025
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 line and 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.
Julian Adon Alexander (b. 1998) is an illustrator based in New York. His work seeks to tell relatable stories of the many ways human emotion can manifest itself in the physical world. Alexander creates visual metaphors using imagery from various forms of his favorite media and observations of everyday things and people that one might walk by without paying attention to. Alexander received a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts. His work is held in several private collections and has been exhibited in California, London, France, Japan, New York, and Tennessee.
Anthony Coleman (b. 1969) is a self-taught artist based in Philadelphia. Inspired at a young age to create art, he found expression through the use of varied and convenient mediums such as scraps of paper, napkins, newspapers, and discarded pizza boxes. Influenced greatly by seminal cartoons and pop art from the 1970s and 80s, Coleman continues to re-ignite a vibrant perspective on modern folk. By abstracting and reimagining these recognizable figures from cinema, comics, and music, he presents a playful vision of iconic characters. Coleman’s work is held in several collections and has been exhibited in California, Chicago, Germany, London, Milan, New York, Philadelphia, Texas, Virginia, among others.
Choichun Leung (b. 1967) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and musician based in New York. From painting and drawing to sculpture and video, her work is semi-autobiographical, inspired by Buddhist symbolism and advocacy against sexual abuse for greater communal understanding. Leung graduated with a BA in silversmithing from Loughborough College of Art/Design and is the founder of the non-profit organization ‘The Young Girl Project’. Her work is held in private collections and has been exhibited in Florida, New York, and Washington DC.
Hakeem Olayinka (b. 1997) is a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist based in New York. His artistic style is vibrant, satirical, and introspective. Olayinka’s work conveys how he sees himself and the world around him. He uses oil paint to paint people and acrylic paint to adorn characters and shape their reality. Olayinka attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Purchase’s School of Art & Design. His work is held in private collections and has been exhibited in New York, Utah, and Washington DC.
Choichun Leung, Who Looks Inside Awakens, 2019, Ink and pen on panel, 14” x 11”
Julian Adon Alexander, Time and Place, 2024, Graphite and Collage on Toned Paper, 11” x 8.5”
Anthony Coleman, Skeleton in Coffin, 2024, Graphite and colored pencil on paper,
14” x 11”
Hakeem Olayinka, The End of the Day, 2022, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 40” x 30”
