The Thinkspace project room will be the home to Sean Mahan's latest exhibition, Translucent Vision. Known for his graphically-stylized take on social realism, the Florida-based painter creates sweetly nostalgic portraits and illustrative renderings of children, incorporating vintage objects and motifs to explore an idea of cultural obsolescence through the fetishization of symbols and references drawn from bygone eras. With interest in the socializing dimensions of culture and consumption, Mahan encourages the viewer to critically reconsider their preconceptions and engagement with the mores that physically determine not only our ways of seeing but our potential for growth and more substantive existences. Mahan seeks the innately good and redemptive qualities of humans, drawing from both hopeful and melancholic reserves in his imagery.
Fascinated and disconcerted by the mediation and experiential dispossession dominating our encounters with the world, especially given our pathological reliance on digitally-mitigated forms of communication, Mahan considers the sociocultural fallacies of "progress" and the role it ultimately has in shaping and structuring our experience, at best, and atrophying it in confinement, at worst. Translucent Vision explores this idea of a more mutable, cooperative, and plastically referential framework, in place of a confining one.
Each painting is executed on a vintage piece of fabric, culminating a collection amassed over some time by the artist. Once the product of commercial mass manufacturing and popularity gets a taste for itself, the found substrate is transformed, re-contextualized, and returned to the world as a singular object. Transformed by the artist's intervention into an original gesture rather than a cultural artifact, these works suggest both reclamation and loss through their metamorphosis.
On view June 1 - June 22, 2019. Opening reception with the artist on June 1st, 6-9PM.
