Natasha Bowdoin

Sun Dogs

Talley Dunn Gallery
November 4 – December 9, 2023

Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to present Sun Dogs, a solo exhibition of acclaimed Houston-based artist Natasha Bowdoin. Renowned for her sprawling and lush collage-based works and installations teeming with natural abundance, Bowdoin presents her most recent captivating wall-mounted works in this newest exhibition at the gallery. The artist paints with bright primary colors and soft pastels on cut wood to create clustered and cascading forms of vivacious floral and vine-like vegetation that, despite their earthly roots, are also evocative of the celestial. The exhibition’s title, Sun Dogs, references the visual phenomenon of spots of bright light that appear next to the Sun. These “mock” suns are the result of sunlight refracting off atmospheric ice crystals. Etymologically deriving from ancient mythologies, sun dogs came to be called as such as they were seen as heavenly dogs or wolves. Like sun dogs, Bowdoin’s works engage with the natural world not only as it exists, but also in the various ways it is imagined. Finding splendor in the liminal spaces between fact and fiction, science and affect, and what is animate and inanimate; Bowdoin’s thriving and generative forms call us to reconsider our relationships to nature in new lights.

This exhibition features works from a new series Posy where layers of individually cut pieces of painted wood are dynamically arranged in organically unfurling assemblages. The depth and intricacy of these works lend them a sculptural quality that is mesmerizingly immersive, inviting viewers to pause and let their eyes joyously wander. Along with works from the Posy series, the exhibition also features two larger framed works Sun Garden and Thicket. Reminiscent of multivalent points in time and space, ranging from centuries-old botanical illustrations to retro design aesthetics of the 1980s, all of Bowdoin’s works capture the lively and transformative power of nature that disavows easy classification, and compels viewers to question how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

Natasha Bowdoin (b. 1981, West Kennebunk, ME) is a visual artist working in the space between painting and installation, interested in stretching the physical boundaries of painting and exploring notions of painting as site. Her collage inspired, large-scale installations investigate the potential intersections of the visual and the literary while reimagining our relationship to the natural world. Her work has been presented widely in solo exhibitions including most recently with In the Night Garden, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Sideways to the Sun, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Maneater, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), North Adams, MA; and Lunar Spring, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Paper Routes: Women to Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Paper Art, CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands; paperless, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and A Torrent of Words: Contemporary Art and Language, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. Bowdoin received her BA from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, in Classics and Studio Art and her MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including the Core Artist-in-Residence Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2008-2010); the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (2013); the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Artist-in-Residence Program, Omaha (2012); and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2007). She is an Associate Professor in Painting and Drawing at Rice University in Houston, TX where she lives and works.