Mason Owens: waiting for a warm day
on view through June 27, 2026
Opening reception: Friday June 5, 5:30 - 8 pm
On view through June 27, 2026
Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present waiting for a warm day, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Mason Owens. The exhibition will be on view from May 9 - June 26, 2026, with a reception on June 5, 2026 from 5:30 - 8 pm.
In waiting for a warm day, Mason Owens presents a body of paintings that explores memory and nostalgia through an enduring connection to the natural world. Created throughout the winter months, each intimate vignette unfolds like a daydream, reaching toward the warmth and stillness of summer.
Rather than communicating a singular recollection, each painting serves as an amalgam of memory, sensation, and imagined possibilities. Owens’ landscapes and interiors, though often rooted in tangible reality, undergo countless revisions of wiping, scraping and building, to become imagined spaces that feel at once invented and deeply familiar. He begins each work by revisiting moments from past summers, drawn to instants with a particular tangibility, or experiences that feel easy to re-enter and expand upon. In works such as soaking my sore ankle, the artist recalls the sensation of cool water against an injured ankle, while sharing a small room in a very old house combines the hot morning light of Owens’ childhood bedroom with the architecture of a hostel he once stayed in while traveling through Ireland. These fragments become less concerned with factual representation than with atmosphere, sensation, and the ways memory compresses time and place into something emotionally tangible.
Working in egg tempera, Owens builds each surface through delicate, deliberate layers of paint, allowing subtle gaps to remain open as spaces of pause and possibility. This material process mirrors the space and tension between two environments: a calling to interior spaces as sites of solace and reflection, and the pull toward landscape and the external escape of adventure. Never completely detached, remnants of longing for stability or escape can be found in their counterparts. In a cozy interior, a subtle breeze flows through an open window with a whisper of freedom. In an expansive riverscape, an old wooden chair sits planted into the bank, grounding and comforting as someone sips their tea. The paintings settle into a careful balance between restlessness and grounding, inviting an awareness of immediate experience and attentive presence.
Hovering between recollection and invention, stillness and movement, Owens’ paintings offer a poetic meditation on longing and the fleeting comforts attached to both past and possibility. Remembrance is never treated as fixed or complete, but instead as an evolving space where reflection and anticipation continuously converge.