Sean Downey | Why Each Perfumed Flower
June 24 - July 30, 2022
LaMontagne Gallery, Boston
Why heroes die at sunrise
Why the birds are arrows of the wise
Why each perfumed flower
Why each moment has its hour
It's you
It's all true
Stranger than that we're alive
- Jobʼs Tears, Incredible String Band
Sean Downeyʼs recent body of work begins with photogrammetry and 3D scans of objects, scenes, and figures from the physical world. These are then embedded within digital scenarios in virtual reality, and later spun into visual sources for handmade paintings and ceramic sculptures. Downey states: “The back and forth translation from digital to analog has a way of making the familiar and pedestrian feel strange and mysterious. The residue of this mystery extends into the iterative process of painting, where worlds that have been experienced virtually and physically become more and less known as they are abstracted, synthesized, and metabolized through the material of paint. The larger works in Why Each Perfumed Flower also engage an interest in the relationship between the whole of an image and the parts. There is an attempt to fall in love with, and get lost in all of the smaller moments in the paintings while also choreographing the parts into a clunky, overloaded, but unified ʻwhole.ʼ This is also related to the very analog, physical encounter we have with a painting as viewers, where walking up to and around a painting becomes a narrative in space, the seemingly static image changing and unfolding as you move around it in the room. Virtual and augmented reality create a kind of pantomime or caricature of this sort of physical encounter, but they also direct our attention to our own movements in relation to the world around us. I want to create paintings that give you that sort of simultaneous, multiple awareness of the image, the object, and your own process of perception as you encounter the work.” The imagery in Downeyʼs artwork juxtaposes and overlaps interiors, exteriors, home, office, and studio as a visual metaphor for the confusion of thoughts, memories, anxieties, predictions, and daily routines that seem to have become increasingly intermingled in recent years.