James Harris Gallery | Claire Cowie "Blind Spot"

Claire Cowie "Blind Spot"

May 29, 2024—July 20, 2024 | Reception Saturday, June 1st, 4-6PM

James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our tenth exhibition with artist Claire Cowie. Her first at our new gallery in Dallas. Paper has been the artist’s primary material. Like much of Cowie’s past work, the six pieces in the exhibition use multiple perspectives and multiple points of view. Titled “Blind Spot”, the artist questions ideas of what we see, what we ignore, and what we think we perceive. Her deliberate conflation of positive and negative space and intense patterning creates circuitous paths that lead the viewer through Cowie’s personal visual archive which entangles public observation and private introspection. Along with direct application of pigment, she has repurposed her previous watercolors and prints along with pieces of fabric that embellish and enhance her work, a cacophony of referential imagery as well as abstract forms.

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Claire Cowie uses a variety of media to reference the natural world around her home in Seattle, as well as around the world. Cowie utilizes symbols of the natural world such as birds, insects, and a variety of plant-life, as well as heavily using the negative space in a work. By using watercolor and ink in the areas around her subject Cowie references the fragmentation between the natural world and us, as well as of memory. The colors and shapes in her work create dream-like landscapes that pull in characteristics of urban architecture.

Claire Cowie lives and works in Seattle, Washington, where she is a lecturer at the University of Washington. Cowie attended both the North Carolina School of the Arts (Winston-Salem, NC) and Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO). She received her MFA from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Cowie’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Takeda Biennial (Oaxaca, Mexico), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Shenzhen Art Institute (Shenzhen, China) and the Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Lake Oswego, OR). Her work is included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA), Safeco (Seattle, WA), and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), among others.