CORYDON COWANSAGE

DWELL

October 21st – November 27th, 2016

Opening reception: Friday, October 21st, 6-8pm

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MILLER is pleased to announce Dwell, the first solo exhibition by New York-based artist Corydon Cowansage. The paintings presented in Dwell explore the psychology of space and the relationships between the built environment, landscape, and abstraction. Using repeating forms like blades of grass, roof shingles, bricks, and leaves, she makes optical, meditative abstractions that creep into representation. 

Cowansage’s paintings range in scale from six inches to nine feet, and locate the viewer in awkward spatial situations. Viewers are pressed up against a wall, forced into a hole, or pushed to the ground. Her paintings produce uncanny perceptual shifts as they flip-flop between pure abstraction and more naturalistic representation. Flat geometries suddenly have depth and mass, space is folded or compressed, perspective and scale are askew, and access is blocked. Forms also reference the bodyβ€”bricks are fleshy, leaves have veins, grass stands in for hair or fingers, and dirt becomes skin. Shapes almost touch, poke, rub.

Corydon Cowansage (b. 1985, Philadelphia) received her MFA in painting from RISD and BA in art from Vassar College. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Her paintings have been exhibited most recently at Deli Projects (Basel, Switzerland), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY), James Graham & Sons (New York, NY), harbor (Brooklyn and New York, NY), and projekt722 (Brooklyn, NY). She lives and works in New York.

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Image detail: Corydon Cowansage, Grass #59, 2016, Acrylic on canvas, 18 by 16 inches. Photo credit: Tim Schutsky