PRESS RELEASE
Gallery Hours: Fri & Sat, 11 am – 4 pm, or by appointment
info@grossmccleaf.com, 215-665-8138
___
Nicole Parker: How Sad, How Lovely
Exhibition Dates: June 6 – June 28, 2025
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present How Sad, How Lovely, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Nicole Parker. An accomplished intaglio printmaker and intuitive colorist, Parker brings a quiet intensity to her paintings, where perception, memory, and emotion are distilled into delicate calibrations of light, air, and atmosphere. Her layered and step-wise approach lends itself to subtle transformation: “I like the resulting sense of boundlessness,” she reflects, “But I also want to highlight the physicality of things that we usually perceive as an absence of anything…‘Dark’ and ‘air’ and ‘space’ don’t mean nothingness.”
With tenderness and precision, Parker invites viewers into intangible moments—of dusk, a distant glow, or the faint glint of fur in shadow. Her subjects are often overlooked or unseeable: sky, darkness, quiet. “Light is the leading character in everything hung in this show,” she notes, “but the source of it is never necessary.”
The exhibition unfolds in two parallel threads. The first is observational: Parker’s Clock paintings, which appear abstract at first glance, are subtle color fields based on direct views of the sky at different times. “There’s a lot at stake,” she says, “because if the color relationships are off, it breaks the illusion.” Based on fleeting light seen through her studio window or from a parked car, these skies are stripped of objects but full of presence. “When the subject is something as elemental as light/air/atmosphere,” Parker says, “color isn’t just the most important thing—it’s the only thing left.”
The second thread returns to Parker’s narrative inclinations: works such as Tiger, Lost Fur, and Don’t Worry Kid, It’s Not Real offer glimpses into the artist’s personal memory and invented allegory. Images such as a suburban desk bathed in morning light, a poster glimpsed across the street, a grassland familiar and strange, drawn from Parker’s personal memories of growing up in the suburbs, are filtered through a lens of nostalgia, longing, and subtle humor. “I’m always ribbing [the suburbs] a little,” she says, “but in an affectionate way.” Works like Walk On the Wild Side, and Found You form a vague visual story—part memory, part invention—mirroring scenes of the familiar tinged with unease.
“How Sad, How Lovely,” a phrase borrowed from a Connie Converse song, perfectly captures the mood of the exhibition. These paintings are at once tender and distant, melancholic and affectionate—always alert to the fleeting beauty of the intangible. “Everything is temporary, everything will pass,” Parker says. “To me, that’s both amazing and tragic…but I also realize that the knowledge of temporariness is part of what lets me love those things so fully.” The result is a body of work that feels rich, specific, and personal—even as it gestures toward the universal.
Nicole Parker is an oil painter and intaglio printmaker based in Mount Airy, Maryland. She received her BFA and Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 2018, and has held a steady studio practice since graduating. She was a recipient of the Richard Von Hess Travel Scholarship in 2017, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2022. Nicole looks forward to her fifth solo exhibition, How Sad, How Lovely, displayed at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, where she is currently represented. Her work is held in collections throughout the U.S., including at PAFA, the Woodmere Art Museum, and the private collection of Linda Lee Alter. Nicole can usually be found working in her home studio (a converted attic), or etching and printing plates at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, MD, where she greatly enjoys both teaching and learning from other artists.
Nasir Young: In Plain Sight
Exhibition Dates: June 6 – 28, 2025
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present In Plain Sight, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Nasir Young. With this body of work, Young expands his visual language beyond the streetscapes of Philadelphia, drawing from recent travels across the country to explore how built environments—no matter how culturally distinct—carry shared codes of belonging and memory. Young notes, “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.”
Young’s process is one of accumulation. Observation, intuition, and material culture converge in his practice, where found imagery, street ephemera, signage, and windows are stitched into quiet, open-ended narratives. “I’ve always enjoyed hiding elements in paintings that only friends would search for, like an Easter egg.” Young explains. “My works exist to show what was in plain sight all along.”
Ranging from miniature location and object portraits to large-scale compositions, the exhibition includes the smallest and largest paintings of Young’s career. His paintings often take on the structure of ‘a painting within a painting’, creating windows that offer multiple entry points into a scene. “Multiple windows give the viewer more to chew on to build a story of their own,” he shares. In Butterflies, for instance, a gesture by a graffiti artist sparked a chain of visual associations: the risk and love inherent in street art, the romantic sensibility of Dutch still life painting, and the humble poetry of flowers placed in a beer bottle rather than a vase—an offering that feels truer to the figure within the painting.
Young also introduces a new series of small-format works rooted in his graduate studies in material culture. Spare and observational, these ‘minis’ isolate a single object— a traffic cone, a newspaper stand, a Japanese Gundam action figure—imbued with quiet familiarity. “They are from paintings I’ve already made, want to make, or will never make,” Young notes. Though modest in scale, these works offer entry into his broader world of recurring motifs and visual cues. “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.”
Titles such as Rapunzel and Trojan Horse extend his paintings’ layered narratives. The former suggests a heroine’s story unfolding in a city rowhouse; the latter evokes the intrigue of a blank delivery van parked on a quiet street. “A van isn’t necessarily out of place in a gated community or a back alley,” Young remarks. “And this creates tension, especially when you don’t know what’s inside.”
Figures—when they appear—often serve as compositional elements rather than focal points. “Often a figure and a traffic cone could fill the same role,” he says. In Stuck, a nearly monochrome image of a snowbound car, a lone windshield wiper rises like a quiet cry for help. It’s a painting born from an ordinary view outside Young’s former workplace—a view he had seen countless times but only felt compelled to paint on a particularly bleak, snowy day. That sense of stillness and entrapment—of fear held just beneath the surface—animates the work. The composition explores how much can be drawn from almost nothing, turning a blank, frozen scene into one charged with tension and unresolved feeling.
Throughout the exhibition, Young’s work invites viewers to slow down and reconsider what is too often overlooked. “I think people don’t realize how much they actually see, because their day-to-day life takes so much precedence,” he reflects. With a poetic eye for detail and structure, In Plain Sight offers a layered meditation on the narratives embedded in everyday urban life.
Nasir Young received his BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2021; and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Delaware (2026). Nasir is currently represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia. In 2020 he was awarded The Raymond D. & Estelle Rubens Travel Scholarship to go to London. Young was awarded an illuminate arts grant in 2021 and 2022, and a 2024 Elizabeth greenshields grant recipient. He was the Second place winner of the Philadelphia Sketch Club 158th exhibition of small oils, a 2022 Davinci Art Alliance Resident, and 2023 Delaware Contemporary resident. Nasir’s primary source of imagery is the everyday scenes of urban inner city life influenced by the shared visual language between places. He had his first solo show in February of 2024, and has had multiple group shows along the East coast.