For Untitled Houston 2025, Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present new paintings by Baltimore- based artist Mason Owens and Richmond-based artist TJ Rinoski. Across their paintings, the booth will chart the shifting thresholds between day and night. While both artists attend closely to the mutable qualities of atmosphere, color, and light, their approaches diverge, each offering his own mode of representing the slippage between observed realities and imagined spaces.

Owens’s paintings, rendered in egg tempera on panel, emerge from a devotional slowness and grounded attentiveness to the natural world and its rhythms. Conjured from memory, his rural landscapes, quiet interiors, and small-town vignettes hold a clarity that feels both precise and emotionally fraught. Subtle modulations of tone, shadow, and line convey the sensation of time passing in barely perceptible shifts: a cooling breeze filtering in through a window, the faint silvering of moonlight, the hush of an interior lit by a table lamp. In each painting, Owens invites us to still our minds and develop more awareness of the thresholds between states.

Where Owens offers spaces of reflection, Rinoski crafts interiors charged with psychological intensity. Working primarily in oil on unstretched linen, he stages objects, cropped figures, and fragments of architecture in unexpected, sometimes unnatural and monochromatic light. Rinoski’s palette and facture heighten ambiguities teased in his compositions, as deceptively simple scenes are blurred or reflected, suggesting a larger narrative just beyond the viewer’s reach. The result is a kind of temporal suspension; an image held between revelation and concealment.

Together, Owens and Rinoski engage in a dialogue of contrasts: softness and tension, nature and constructed space, clarity and ambiguity. Owens’s scenes open outward, framing the horizon in patient increments while Rinoski’s close in, intensifying the charge of what is close at hand. In their juxtaposition, the viewer moves through a full arc of the day - not just in hours, but in states of being - moving from the crisp lucidity of the visible world into the mutable half-light of memory, dream, and interior life.