Sean Downey received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Boston University. He currently lives and works in Fairfield, IA, where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Maharishi University.

“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.”

SELECT Exhibitions

• Why Each Perfumed Flower, LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA, 2022

• Two-Hundred Percent of Life, Anderson Gallery, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, 2022

• Random Rules, Shelter in Place Gallery, Boston, MA, 2021

• Black & White vs. Color, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, 2020

• Oh to be a Painting, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA, 2020

• Sun Worship and Solar Machines, Assemblage Gallery, Boston, MA, 2018

• Out of Our Closet, LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA, 2018

• You Never Know How You Look Through Other People’s Eyes, ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME, 2018

• Wholly Idle, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA

• Circle Time, Able Baker Contemporary, Portland, ME, 2018