Passages

The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition, Passages, works on paper by Claire Cowie.

In Passages, Claire Cowie moves away from incorporating characters and folklore in her work while maintaining her interest in the community that surrounds her. Taking photos while biking or walking around Seattle, Cowie uses the images as compositional references for her paintings. Emphasizing the negative space in her work, Cowie captures fleeting moments in a shifting and fractured ecosystem. Her watercolor paintings reveal the architecture of the built and natural environment while offering a dreamlike mindscape highlighting the fragmentation of memory and time.

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.