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. 

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.