Sean Powers
Painting MA
Royal College of Art
Specialisms: Painting / Printmaking / Drawing
Location: London, United Kingdom
Sean Powers
First Name: Sean
Last Name: Powers
Specialisms: Painting / Printmaking / Drawing
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: Royal College of Art
Course / Program Title: Painting MA
About
Sean Powers (b. 1992) is an American artist living and working in London, UK. He graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and an MA Painting degree from the Royal College of Art in 2024.
He says of his work: I want to make paintings that feel like seeing a UFO, oscillating between knowable and unidentifiable. My paintings fingerprint a psychedelic process of abstracting a posthuman sensibility and nonhuman intelligence reflected in the observational painting of nature and landscapes. Natural subjects and paint materials become universal instruments to convey idiosyncratic intonations and posthuman thought. Conversing with materials and observing nature through an experiential perspective encounters the sybilline relationship between human and nonhuman. Balancing somewhere between science fiction, mystical abstraction and natural observation, an open ended narrative is constructed for a generative experience predicated on the notion of purpose without a purposiveness. I expand upon the idea of landscape painting as a genre with the capacity to make room for the imagination through the layering and merging of futuristic daydreams and natural observations within my work. The subjection of nature to something alien riffs on the dreamy philosophical enquiries in landscape painting through comparisons of the natural and otherworldly to challenge our notions of nature, human and nonhuman. This echoes into the painting's unorthodox construction, as the image of nature is located in reality while the materials and techniques are located in a posthuman dimension. I experiment with a range of printmaking inspired techniques, distortion and pixelated rock-like textures to shift the visual realm into a graphic haptic experience that takes us to a posthuman aesthetic domain. Paint's materiality and the subjects represented in paint exist as pareidolia, teetering between matter and a non-matter experience.
His recent exhibitions include: Satellite Paradise, Rhett Baruch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Parallax Art Fair, Gallery M, London, UK; Open Call 2024, Me Paints Me; RCA Painting Degree Show 2024, London, UK; Caper, Greatorex St., London, UK; Things That Matter, AMP Gallery, London, UK; Foundations, Chilli Art Projects, London, UK; Junctures, Chilli Art Projects, London, UK; Risovision, The Print Shop LA, Los Angeles, CA; Greetings From Home, Glorious Flaming Particles, The Print Shop LA, Los Angeles, CA. He’s also been shortlisted for the 2024 Cass Art Prize.
A squircle is a blended word to describe the shape between a square and a circle. This shape is interesting from a behavioral design perspective, as it has a major influence on our aesthetic culture and perceptions of the future. The squircle appears in considerable usage during the space age, and has been used in the window design of objects traveling at high speeds and under extraordinary pressures such as airplanes, submarines and spacefaring vehicles. It has also been used in cell phone designs and as the infamous icons of big tech corporations such as Apple and Android software. This series of paintings envision a posthuman aesthetic blending acrylic and oil paint, texture and flatness, natural observations and futuristic abstractions through the visionary vignette of squircle shaped substrates.
Competitions
Global Creative Graduate Showcase 2024
"The Watcher" paintings is an ongoing series composed of pixelated rock-like textures interfering with imagery from natural observations of landscapes, forests and architecture, and source imagery derived from science fiction media. Natural subjects are perceived as existing in a blurry world where the speed of futuristic forms are rushing by landscapes and plant life, distorting their form. Sometimes the forests and plant life freezes its state, as an attempt to control digital imagery and communicate with the observer of the painting. While there is an otherworldly quality to the cybernetic imagery, nature from the biosphere pronounces itself as a psychedelic intelligence demanding its attention. "The Watcher" refers to the aspect of the audience watching a dynamic posthuman event unfold between nature and artificial technology in painting.
Competitions