"How are you managing these days?"
"In all honesty, terrible. Thanks for asking."

At its core, "Nuclear Family" is a visual diary depicting the everyday life of a young family — a couple and two young children — within a reality of ongoing threat. The paintings are based on photographs, drawings, and sketches made during the rounds of war with Iran over the past year, and gather moments captured between sirens: a baby playing with his father's glasses, a girl blowing soap bubbles as a fighter jet passes overhead, a pregnant woman looking at her partner, who has fallen asleep on the couch. Alongside love, desire, boredom, and humor appear interceptions, destroyed houses, and shards. Inside and outside, private space and public reality exist side by side — a world in which children and war are present at the same time and in the same place.

The choice of oil pastel gives the series an immediate, expressive quality. The texture of the medium and its seemingly cheerful palette stand in tension with the distress and vulnerability that emerge from the images. Oil pastel, associated with childhood and early drawing, allows Dan Allon to hold, through line and smudge, both the everyday and the threatening.

In the exhibition, the series is transformed from a personal visual diary into a story that unfolds in space, like a book that comes apart and is rebuilt as a three-dimensional, multisensory display. Connections between images and words are formed in different ways: paintings with text integrated into them, images that link together into a narrative, and alongside them, pauses — an image without words or words without an image — and in the background, sound clips, some verbal and some made up of sounds. Some images demand lingering, reading, and an extra breath, and conceal streams of consciousness within them. Between the images, words, voices, and walls, a movement of leafing through time takes shape through the viewer's movement in the space.

The gaze is a central element of the entire progression. Many of the works contain doublings and appearances of inside and outside, which add layers of images and reflections. The soap bubbles, too, carry some of the images, and blowing them allows the viewer to take part in the play between real and painted reflections. Thus a recurring encounter takes place between the image and the one who looks at it: the work invites us not only to look, but returns us to ourselves and to the point of view from which we read what is happening. The exhibition moves from the personal story to a shared experience — from this particular family to a broader reality, in which the private and the public, the intimate and the threatening, exist within one another.