Alisoun started her Chinatown Series when she lived on Grand & Ludlow Streets in New York City. It grew out of her love of food, obsession with meat, and curious about her neighborhood, and its street identity. Weaving through its maze of wild abundance, hyper-crowded, calls of daily specials and sidewalk spitting, with fish markets spilling out into the streets, rankly sweet smelling, tables of greens and fruits, steamy dumpling windows, hanging ducks shellacked with fat, orange neon signs and then like a punch card, all closed down.
…finding her interest in the theatre of food display she focuses less on documentation and instead on the fractured recollections of the ever moving pedestrian.
The works are large, colourful, and figurative; encouraging a collection of discussions involving ethnicity, class, consumption, pattern, and photography. The large scale of these drawings is deliberate so that, in a sense, the windowpane has been removed and the market brought into the viewer’s space, transporting one community into another. These works are a sort of homage to the individual proprietor, the corner store, and that place of local congregation as these neighborhoods shift with the realities of urban gentrification and one-stop supermarkets.
