reviews > Portland, ME

Jason Mowery
Jason Mowery

10/1/10 2:59PM

We live in a world full of patterns. Paisley ties, floral wallpaper, swooping climate arrows on the weather channel, crazy carpets in Vegas casinos, hotel lobbies and movie theaters. (Those last are necessary to render the stains from spilled drinks discrete.) Rarely, however, do we get the chance to focus on this decoration, since it is almost always attached to something else that demands our attention—the man wearing the tie, tomorrow’s prediction of rain, counting cards. Thankfully Jason Mowery has taken it as his very subject, rendering genuinely eye-catching swoops and swirls in all-over configurations on large canvases. They don’t pretend to be much more than pleasing ornament, but what’s nifty about them is how they make primary those patterns that are almost always merely secondary. And when Mowery paints them on sheets of Plexiglas, he goes a step further. Hanging them on a blank wall, as he sometimes does, is a waste. These see-through works belong in front of busy walls, suspended in windows and in the middle of rooms. Let the world be the background for once—the patterns have waited long enough.

—Lori Waxman