December 11, 2025 – March 21, 2026
On-View: December 11, 2025 – March 21, 2026
Opening Reception: December 11, 2025, 6-9 PM
Through personal and group narratives, Philadelphia based artists David Evan McDowell, Lendl Tellington, and Rashid Zakat offer a meditation on the universal yearning to make sense of our existence and purpose in this life, while questioning how institutional systems and prescriptive socialization shape the journey to consciousness. Although raised within disparate traditional religious frameworks, this brotherhood found their respective spiritual grounding and expression through their individual artistic practices, pop culture, and music. Their collective offerings explore the intricate intersections between spirituality, masculinity, and community. At the heart of their liturgy lies an essential question: As beings inherently driven by the need for context, what stories do we construct and internalize to navigate the complexities of the world in which we exist?
David Evan McDowell is a multimedia artist whose work strategically uses visual contrast, both in compositional elements and thematic juxtapositions, as a parallel to the emotional and intellectual tension between societal traditions and personal volition. While his visual art is rooted in portraiture and documentary photography, he is also a music producer who has generated acclaim for his work with Tanya Morgan, and brands such as DC Shoes. Recently, McDowell participated in an artist residency at Mas Els Igols in Barcelona, Catalonia. He is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Lendl Tellington is a filmmaker and visual artist who tinkers with time like a deejay, remixing the line between prescribed histories and collective memory. Working across documentary, narrative film, photography, and installation, he transforms traditional power dynamics by creating intimate spaces where subjects become collaborators in shaping their own representation. His minimalist approach crafts imagery with a seamless grandeur where everyday gestures carry inherited wisdom. Tellington’s practice refuses to separate fiction from non-fiction, deploying each to expose what the other conceals. This methodology moves fluidly from Baltimore row houses to Senegalese coastlines, museum galleries to community centers. Through collaborative processes that honor both subject and community, he demonstrates that preservation itself is resistance, inspiring communities to claim narrative ownership when other forms remain elusive. Tellington’s work has been recognized by the Smithsonian and supported by Sundance, Firelight Media, and Bay Area Video Coalition.
Rashid Zakat is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and deejay. His work over the past two decades consists of short films, music videos, internet art, photography, dance parties and installations. Black social aliveness is politically imperative for his work to breathe, disrupting the systematic containment of Black people and centering their urgencies, curiosities, interactions, and collective expressions. He induces audiences to be loud, enlivened, and to revel in the glory of communal excitement and pleasure. Zakat’s artwork has been exhibited by Black Star Projects, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Critical Distance Center, Black Soil Film Festival, Lenfest Institute, Barnes Foundation, Movement 4 Black Lives, and many more.
