Art Sync: In Plain Sight

Elizabeth Johnson: When we talked about narrative in your paintings for the last Gross McCleaf interview in 2024, you said narrative is inspired by "a scene I've seen a million times but this time shadows moved the right way to catch my attention. Other places, it's me just constantly taking in information and curating it, becoming fascinated."

Has your sense of associating narrative with details and streetscapes changed?

Nasir Young: The narratives have started to shift away from South Philly and Philly as a whole, but they are still rooted there as a starting point. Last year, I received an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, which I used to travel the country looking for a shared visual language of places that are culturally different: New Hampshire, Kansas City (Missouri), Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Maryland. I’m using the same principles of finding an image but expanding the conversation.

There is an ability to read a landscape you've never been in and find belonging.

EJ: Current pieces such as Convenience, Tour Guide, and Butterflies are composed as a painting within a painting, recalling former works We Outside and Full Service.

EJ: I love the small single image paintings of quotidian street furniture. Location Sample #01 features plastic stacking crates in snow that also looks like books. Besides making portraits of familiar street "characters," why focus on one subject at a time? Are these paintings meant to be affordable and collectable for friends and other artists? Did you use a sidewalk-cement-colored background to unify this series?

NY: These little minis were from a material culture class I’m taking in grad school. Finding out everything I could about an object led me to consider the images of my work and to identify what pulls me in. They are from paintings I’ve already made, want to make, or will never make. An important part of my practice has always been observation. My camera roll currently has 15,862 photos: some don’t have enough interesting information to justify their own paintings, some demand I stop what I'm working on and paint them now, and every variation in between.

NY: My painting practice has been largely outside of school, beginning at the tail end of PAFA and then a three-and-a-half year gap before starting my master’s. I’ve been getting to talk and write about the work, and this has been pushing my ability to weave more narratives and open-ended stories into my paintings.

Titles come before, during, after––anytime; for Rapunzel and Trojan Horse they came about midway while working on them. To talk about Trojan Horse a little: I was thinking about the van, which has graced many of my works. Vans are chameleons; they’re used for every business under the sun; they’re blank––wrapped in branding––covered in graffiti––anything. A van isn’t out of place in a gated community or a back alley, and this creates tension especially when you don’t know what’s inside.

EJ: I loved the spare palette of Stuck, a snowbound car pictured on a parking structure. Seen with your more colorful work, this one wastes no words telling the story of a grim Pennsylvania winter. The windshield wiper seems to signal distress, like arms raised to the gods for help. How did this piece come about? Is imagination always the key to eliciting what you call "a sense of déjà vu, things people have walked by and maybe overlooked," pointing you and your audience toward revelation of an incomplete story?

EJ: Is revealing imagination, for you, also a form of concealment? More formally abstract works such as Faces of Philly 01 and Faces of Philly 02 recall the Faces of London series and 24 hr. Service, Inside Out, and Beauty Salon from your last Gross McCleaf Gallery show, paintings that were continuous with the flat picture plane yet suggested tantalizing, hidden activity. The Faces of Philly series seems more reductionist, leaning into shape, line, and symbol. Is this a new desire to depict South Philly more simply?

NY: Concealing and revealing are important to me. I’ve always enjoyed hiding elements in paintings that only friends would search for, like an Easter egg. My works exist to show what was in plain sight all along. I feel like people don’t realize how much they actually see, because their day-to-day life takes so much precedence. I think the Faces of series, that uses places and cities interchangeably, will be a continuous project; it started when I was staying in London, oddly enough, and it only felt right to get some Philly facades in there too. I think about buildings as having faces that express their lives and experiences just like people. Painted brick, decaying brick, and new brick all say very different things while still being brick.

NY: I don’t think I would ultimately want to teach, because it takes so much of your time and existence. That said, I would rather teach then do non-art related work, which burns me out and spreads me thin. It makes me appreciate the great teachers I’ve had. My former teachers are now peers, which is a crazy feeling and honor to get to work and show with them.

EJ: I love that you share your sketchbooks and revisit and develop ideas over years. In them, we see how you combine working sketches with notes to yourself and solve specific painting problems; it makes sense that you display them when you exhibit. How does verbalizing painting issues and career issues in sketchbooks intersect with painting words and signage and assembling visual narrative clues? Are these different ways you talk to yourself?

NY: My sketchbook is fundamentally the most important step of the process. It’s the melting pot of ideas, and the keeper of things to circle back to. Looking into my sketchbooks is like looking at my brain echo. I was never the person with the snappy response or one-liners. With everything sitting together it gives me time to figure out what I really mean, more than a half-finished statement.

NY: These two shows will be my fifth and sixth show of the year, so, I’m looking forward to just being in the studio with no deadlines. I have inklings of a new body of work I want to start playing with. I have an Upland Artist Residency in southern Vermont for a couple weeks in August.

––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)

edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)

June 2025