jonathan-cowan.com

Jonathan Cowan was born in 1982 in Temple, Texas. He attended The University of Texas at San Antonio where he earned a BFA in 2006. He has participated in numerous exhibitions including shows at Simuvac Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; the Parlour Bushwick, Brooklyn NY; c2c projects, San Francisco, CA; Ventana 244, Brooklyn, NY; and TSA New York, Brooklyn NY. He lives and works in Boston.

Six Radiant Voids ink on paper 5.5 x 4.25 inches 2018

MODERN ARTS AND CRAFTS

Curated by Astri Swendsrud

Danielle Adair Jonathan Cowan Rachel DuVall Michelle Grabner Meghann McCrory Ariane Vielmetter

Opening reception Saturday March 5th, 7-10 PM Closing reception Saturday April 2nd Gallery hours Saturday and Sunday 1-5

Press release

Craft techniques and high modernism have often been positioned as opposing aesthetic trajectories, with their attendant philosophical and gender-based narratives and critiques occupying well-trodden territory. Rather than re-affirming this binary, the artists in this exhibition take both legacies – high modernist abstract painting and “women’s work” textile craft – as equal footings from which to construct new work. This results in existentially strange objects: doilies at the scale of heroic painting, or as animated drawings; traditional textile weavings as minimalist geometry and as the culmination of a photographic process; drawings, paintings and bronze sculpture disguised as fabric swatches and embroidered canvases disguised as paintings. Through disrupting aesthetic and material expectations, the works in this exhibition raise issues of labor, process and gender, while presenting visual surfaces that defy easy apprehension.