Mason Owens: Here and there

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Here and there, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Mason Owens. The exhibition will be on view from January 10 - February 14 at the gallery.

In Here and there, Owens presents a body of paintings that move between interior spaces and remembered landscapes. Bedrooms, windows, empty rooms, distant fields, and nocturnal scenes appear not as fixed locations but as emotional registers, places filtered through memory. The works feel intimate and provisional, as though at the edge of recollection. Figures, when they appear, are softened and indistinct, yet spaces seem inhabited even when empty. Light pools, fades, or flickers, creating a sense of ongoing narrative.

Owens’s paintings are shaped by the tension between domestic interiority and the desire for escape. The interiors reflect an effort to romanticize everyday life - to find comfort, meaning, and beauty within familiar rooms - while the landscapes emerge from travel, friendship, and shared experience beyond the self. Rather than presenting these as oppositional states, the work treats them as parallel expressions of the same impulse: a need to attend closely to moments of connection, whether outward-facing or inwardly absorbed. The exhibition’s title gestures toward this balancing act, capturing the difficulty of remaining present while continually imagining an elsewhere.

The artist works in egg tempera, a historically significant medium known for its labor-intensive process and matte, luminous surface. Owens paints from memory rather than direct observation, allowing time to soften edges and compress experience. The slow accumulation of fine brushstrokes produces surfaces that feel simultaneously fragile and enduring, marked by subtle shifts in color and density. This deliberate pace reinforces the emotional tenor of the work: quiet, reflective.

Landscapes appear less as destinations than as mental spaces, repositories for longing, friendship, and the desire for shared meaning, while interiors become sites of inward attention, where the familiar is repeatedly reexamined. Throughout Here and there, Owens returns to the difficulty of feeling content within one’s own life. The paintings do not resolve this tension; instead, they dwell within it. Domestic spaces and distant places are rendered with equal care, forming a quiet meditation on presence, memory, and the ongoing effort to inhabit one’s life as it unfolds.

Mason Owens (b. 1991; lives and works in Baltimore, MD) holds a BFA from the University of the Arts. He also works as a farmer, gardener, and landscaper - a connection to the natural world that deeply informs his painting practice. He has shown with Megan Mulrooney at Untitled Houston and at Steven Zevitas Gallery.