Japanese Smiles is just shy of five minutes in length, but the images compiled in it represent nearly 5 years of Alan Powell's photography. It’s a collection he is continuously adding to—a tribute to tagged buildings. Powell has always appreciated graffiti; in particular how it disrupts architectural space, how it intervenes visually and conceptually in everyday surroundings. Such street art is destined for a short life: here today, gone when maintenance gets around to repainting it. Powell’s photographs allow these semi-anonymous pieces to exist in some other form long after the original has been wiped away. The movement of Japanese Smiles, with its fast-paced editing, imagery slipping and sliding in every direction, functions in that same way. The music of Japanese Smiles—jazz performed by frequent Powell collaborator Michael Suchorsky—has its own conceptual parallel to the artwork. In jazz, instruments operate independently, listeners get to hear each one in isolation over time, and the tune does not “resolve.” Powell edits the visuals of Japanese Smiles to embrace that same openness, improvisation, and fragmentation—in his words, it is “visual poetry without resolution.” The first showing of Japanese Smiles was a massive projection against Powell’s home in the Catskills. The white exterior of the Victorian-style house became a palette for a narrative story to unfold in flashes and collage of color. Powell’s use of his own home as an artistic subject follows in the tradition of the iconic Painted Ladies in San Francisco, CA, where similar style houses were repainted in vivid, expressive color palettes and entire blocks became interconnected with beautiful color relationships. Powell transforming the neutral base of his home with bold strikes of graffiti takes an alternative approach: his ‘painted lady’ is courtesy of the “fifteen-year-old brat with a bottle of spray paint,” emphasizing rebellion, visual conflict, and a deliberate anti-aesthetic.