Sean Downey

“My work considers our relationship to screens, and the screen’s relationship to, and origins in, painting. Images have always been, in part, an attempt to crush space and time and to lure viewers into an Orphic journey, or down a click hole. Much of my recent work is sourced from spaces built in virtual reality. I collage disparate forms, subjects, and images and then  process these sources through a very handmade approach to painting. VR spaces are treated as a still life or landscape that can be returned to repeatedly throughout the process, adjusted, and mined for visual information to serve the needs of the analog painting process. The confusion and distortion of source imagery has also become a way to keep my approach and response hovering in an abstract space even as the images remain for the most part recognizable. This in-between state seems to mirror my own experience, as a consciousness attempting to sift through and make sense out of a nonstop onslaught of thoughts, memories, and experiences.” - Sean Downey

Sean Downey received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Boston University. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA) and LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA), and has been included in recent group exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY), LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA), and Park Place Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Downey is a founding member of the curatorial collaborative kijidome, winner of the 2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work has been profiled in recent editions of Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and the I Like Your Work Podcast. He currently lives and works in Fairfield, IA, where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Maharishi International University.

While You Were Sleeping - 2021- Group Exhibition
Benson Downey Wetzel - 2020 - Erik Benson, Sean Downey, and Michael Wetzel
Out of Our Closet - 2018 - Group Exhibition
Hunker Hawser- 2014 - Sean Downey
Four Young Boston Artists - 2012 - Corey Corcoran, Sean Downey, Kris Mortensen, Paul Endres Jr.