Emily Walker (@NextDinnerParty) is a writer, interior designer, and arts advocate who curates intimate, home-based exhibitions that blend art, design, and community. After spending twelve years living abroad, she returned to Washington, DC with a renewed desire to re-root and cultivate an art-driven life in the city she calls home. Through salon-style gatherings and residential exhibitions, Walker seeks to create spaces where contemporary art feels approachable, personal, and deeply woven into everyday living.
Here are here most recent art shows:
Mazes and Masks
Hieroglyphs from a Watched City
Paintings by Adam Mele
Washington, DC is a city that speaks in symbols. Badges, seals, acronyms, flags, credentials, clearance levels. Power here is rarely plainspoken — it’s encoded. Adam Mele’s paintings operate the same way. Repeating patterns behave like bureaucratic language. Eyes function as watchers embedded in the system. Plants and vessels act as camouflage. Reading like contemporary hieroglyphs with a propulsive momentum — dense with repetition, movement, and disguise — Mele’s paintings can feel like a code to be cracked before time runs out. These works don’t just document the watched city of Washington DC, but illustrate how an artist can be the ultimate surveiller of the system itself.
About the Artist: Adam Mele (@WelcomeGnat) is a Washington, DC–based artist whose work explores movement, symbolism, and visual language through vibrant color and rhythmic line. His paintings are characterized by energetic, squiggling forms that feel at once spontaneous and deliberate, evoking a sense of coded communication or contemporary hieroglyphics. Mele’s visual vocabulary is deeply informed by his time living in Indonesia, where he spent three years immersed in language and culture. Indonesian artistic traditions, patterning, and symbolic storytelling continue to influence his work, appearing as repeating motifs, ornamental structures, and layered narrative elements. His professional work as an Indonesian interpreter further reflects his ongoing engagement with language as both structure and expression, a theme that resonates strongly throughout his paintings. In addition to his artistic practice, Mele is a full-time ESL instructor at American University. His work in language education parallels his visual practice, both centered on communication, interpretation, and bridging cultural experiences. This dual focus often manifests in paintings that feel like visual conversations—playful yet complex, intuitive yet coded. Working within the creative landscape of Washington, DC, Mele contributes to the city’s evolving contemporary art scene through work that is both accessible and visually intricate. His paintings reward sustained viewing, encouraging audiences to explore their layered narratives and symbolic vocabulary.
The catalogue for Mazes and Masks:
Still, Here brings together 22 oil pastels by Algerian artist Billel Decherani, whose vivid, Matisse-like colors breathe movement into scenes of quiet isolation.
His subjects — birds, a horse, a guitar, vases, men and women in quiet contemplation — appear rooted in place, yet alive with color and tension. Through these contrasts, Decherani captures the strange beauty of being bound and blooming all at once.
Hosted within the global-eclectic apartment of Washington DC-based designer Emily Walker, the exhibition explores how art transforms space — revealing the vibrancy within stillness and the extraordinary within the familiar.
A conversation between color and quiet, between Algiers and DC, between the places we inhabit and the ways we see.
About the Artist: Bilell Decherani, born 1995, lives and works in Algeria. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts in Algiers, he returned to his hometown of Medea, which is not far from Algiers but seemed worlds away. It was during this time, and from a place of seeing the familiar with new eyes, that he completed the works that would make their way to the United States and be on display in Still, Here.
The Catalogue for Still, Here:
