Sean Downey | Motion Pictures

October 24 - November 29, 2025

LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

Time, which is not usually visible, which in order to become so seeks out bodies and, wherever it encounters them, seizes them to show its magic lantern over them.

-Marcel Proust

The work in this exhibition uses images and forms as proxies for a feeling sense about time. On the level of feeling, distinctions between the political, the cultural, the historical, and the autobiographical become murky and fungible, and images arise that seem almost to tell a story but are primarily aimed at the evocation of sensation, particularly sensation that can embrace contradictions. Animals stand in for protagonists. Encountering a nonhuman consciousness brings to the fore a sense that meaning in the objects we engage with is not fixed. Our understanding (and use) of cash, spheres, plants, time, books, toys, rocks, etc, is provisional and non-binary.

Stillness stands in for movement, and time is trapped in the ‘body’ of work. The medium of painting invokes a projection into the past—both the art historical past as well as the immediate past of the object’s creation. In a world of ephemeral, throwaway images, it also invokes an intended trajectory into the future; painting aims to last. These paintings and sculptures embrace their dual existence as both images and objects. Like film stills, the imagery suggests a moment in time, removed from narrative context, pointing toward imagined pictorial worlds that exist elsewhere, while the handmade-ness of the work—the marks, gestures, and physical idiosyncrasies—contradicts this ‘elsewhere’, grounding the work firmly in the concrete world of the here and now.