A note on the current Curation by Orli swergold:

New York City is saturated with emblems. From municipal seals mounted above public school entrances to tiled insignias embedded in subway platforms to the ubiquitous “Mama’s Little Meatball” T-shirts lining Canal Street, the city offers no shortage of badges, crests, logos, and trademarks. In City Glyphs, Jairo Serna, Christopher Campbell, and Michael Dispensa engage this dense visual language, each drawing from the iconography that scaffolds daily life in the city. Structured as a durational group exhibition, the presentation rotates between the three artists, each singly occupying the window at OK Gallery and producing a temporal dialogue in which their works intersect conceptually rather than physically.

Serna and Dispensa, both Queens natives, turn to the built environment and its vernacular forms. Serna creates primarily figurative paintings and drawings that probe intimacy and alienation within the urban landscape, addressing gentrification and the quiet spectacle of everyday life. Dispensa reconstructs elements such as subway seating, surveillance cameras, and civic seals, using replication as a way to examine the tension between beauty, failure, and aspiration embedded in New York’s public infrastructure. Campbell, a transplant, looks to keychains, vanity plates, and other tokens of affiliation, to create new compositions that reflect on belonging, identity, and the desire to claim place.

Across their practices, the city’s visual codes are not simply reproduced but reinterpreted to tell a story. Together, these artists offer distinct yet overlapping love letters to New York and to the people who continually remake its meaning.