My recent work is sourced mainly from spaces built in virtual reality. Using 3d scanning, photogrammetry, and open-source models from museum collections and the internet, I collage disparate sources from my daily life, history, and culture into staged, virtual scenarios. I have long been interested in the relationship of photography and screens to painting (the original “screen”). The crux of my interest in using VR as a source has to do with the mysterious shift in meaning that occurs when a seemingly recognizable image, or image-component, is translated from one medium to another. Mundane elements from my daily life—a patch of grass, a messy tabletop, a stack of books—become somehow strange and unknown when imported into a virtual space. When a collection of digital elements are finally translated back into the analog world through the very clunky, handmade, and iterative process of oil painting, they seem to retain their ‘known’ and ‘unknowable’ qualities simultaneously and in equal proportion.
The sources I use often juxtapose deeply personal, autobiographical, idiosyncratic imagery with historical images/objects/spaces: reliquary busts, statues, period rooms and furniture, or 19th century ‘screen’ diversions like stereoscopes and magic lanterns. I am using these juxtapositions to think about the murky ways that our subjective experience of time and memory intersects and overlaps with the collective, cultural experience of time and memory. I have a sense that our collective experiences of time and space are being changed in ways as radical as the shifts that occurred during the industrial revolution—as I look back at history many visual rhymes and patterns seem to bubble up to the surface—and yet I can only experience the ‘contemporary context’ through the skewed, biased, distorted lens of my own individual experience. Thus, while I ‘sense’ them, I do not believe it is possible to ‘make sense’ of the changes we are all living through; however, I do believe that it is possible to make paintings that might act as a physical point of contemplation to help the maker and a viewer be more present and aware of the world as they move through it.
Sean Downey received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Boston University. He has had recent solo exhibitions at LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA), the Anderson Gallery at Drake University (Des Moines, IA), and Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA), and has been included in recent group exhibitions at UNTITLED Art Fair (Miami Beach, FL), the Museum of Museums (Seattle, WA), Zillman Museum of Art (Bangor, ME), Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston, MA), the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY), 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. He currently lives and works in Fairfield, IA, where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Maharishi International University.
email: sean.m.downey(at)gmail.com