Sniff, 2023

About the Artist

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 at the Royal College of Art in 2024. His recent exhibitions include: Omnipotence of Dream, University of Salford Art Museum, Manchester, UK; Satellite Paradise, Rhett Baruch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Parallax Art Fair, Gallery M Platform, 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. '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 expound 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.'