studio e
609 S brandon street
Seattle WA 98108
May 16-June 27, 2026
May 23, Artist Talk: 3-4pm & Reception: 5-7pm
studio e is proud to present Orders of Nearness, an exhibition of new work by Emily Counts, Matt Jones, and Erin Milez. While each practice is distinctly accomplished, together they form a trio that swirls, pulls, and squishes time into moments that feel both protective and unsteady. Through approaches in painting and sculpture, the artists share a willingness to see the real as imagined, blending familiar forms with surreal distortions to soften and transform complex realities.
Erin Milez’s work locates this distortion within the rhythms of domestic life, where her stout figures move through cycles of daily repetitious maintenance. As Milez describes, “Their wide and strong bodies are workers’ bodies, recalling the workforce in Diego Rivera, Stanley Spencer, and WPA era works.” Like the bodies of the figures, the scenes in the paintings seem gently squished, layered into one another, as gestures of love and labor accumulate into a sense of parental devotion. This is especially evident in A Hop and A Skip, where butterflies float lightly as the viewer assumes the role of the parent peering over the fence for child dropoff. It’s almost as if Milez pressed pause on time, and we’re standing there in the painting. Imagining letting go of a child as they move into their school day, a feeling that reveals a transference of trust in protection and how care extends outward into conditions of uncertainty.
Across Milez’s practice, as well as in the work of Jones and Counts, attention to small ordinariness expands time and beings into something malleable and more emotionally charged: the warmth of picking a dandelion on a summer's day, the sun grazing squinting eyes while walking a child across the street. This sense of protection for the fragile, opens into the work of Emily Counts, whose ceramic figures read as talismans or protective guardians. Counts’ work, however, moves toward the mythological and shapeshifting, where her familiar figures and creatures bring a kind of delightful ferocity.
Adorned with gold luster her recurring visual language made up of spiders, fangs, moths, and flowers, blends a softness with strength. Symbols reappear, accumulating until creatures and figures become increasingly indistinguishable, like the human eyes found in Core Care Lion. In this piece and many others, details such as eyebrows and eyelashes introduce subtle human traits, suggesting a merging of species and identities into hybrid forms. A trait also seen in Milky Minty Bow Portrait, where the repeated presence of eyes and mouths in Counts’ work also suggests this multiplicity of coexistence, hinting that several beings inhabit a single body. In this way, the figures read like older selves, shaped by wisdom and survival. As if for every experience endured, the creature grows another means to see, another voice to articulate.
Through this hybridity, Counts constructs a world where figures and their embodiments of experience, once tender, give way to something unstable and generative. This instability is reinforced by repetition that connects the three artists’ practices. As eyes, gestures, and organic forms drift through Jones’ abstracted spaces, time swirls rather than progresses, making the present both an anchor and distortion point. Within this shared language, Matt Jones approaches painting as a space structured through repetition and contact rather than attempting to resolve a narrative. Eyes recur as sites of looking and reflection, while fingers press, pinch, and interrupt the surface. These gestures introduce a sense of tactile pressure that is both physical and perceptual, as seen in The Pinch. Together, meaning emerges through the relations between forms, inviting attention and investigation to a space where time compiles onto itself.
Across Orders of Nearness, soft lines, bright colors, and rounded characters lead viewers to reconsider the role of time. The result is a body of work that shifts between lightheartedness and emotional depth. Together, these works reconsider shared space as one where protection and vulnerability coexist, and where care is continually reshaped through the act of observing transformation.
- tom manzanarez
“Up/Rooted”
Curated by Aaron Rosen
Maine Jewish Museum
267 Congress Street
Portland, Maine
November 6-December 31, 2025
In 1989, the Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj coined the term Diasporist Art, calling for an art “in which a pariah people, an unpopular, stigmatized people, is taken up, pondered in their dilemmas.” Today, a new generation of Jewish artists is pondering what it means to be displaced or uprooted, sketching out and creating connections across many communities and identities. This exhibition is guest curated by Dr. Aaron Rosen, Executive Director of The Clemente Course in the Humanities; Founder/Director of the Parsonage Gallery. Artists include Rosalba Breazeale, Matt Jones, Susan Klein, Aaron Margolis, Meirav Ong, and Naomi Safran-Hon.
Exhibition Sponsor: Leir Foundation, in memory of Henry J. and Erna D. Leir.
Matt Jones
“Dawn”
The Parsonage
Searsport, ME
May 3-June 22, 2025
“The owl of Minerva,” the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel once mused, “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” I think of these words often when looking at the paintings of Matt Jones, whose images of owls, moths, nocturnal flowers, and fruiting fungi, suggest a crepuscular world stirring to life.
In this benighted moment, as the climate warms and democracy wanes, it would be understandable if Jones retreated further into the shadows in search of wisdom. And yet in his latest paintings we find instead that “morning has broken like the first morning,” in the words of the hymn popularized by Cat Stevens. Rays of Edenic sunshine stream through Jones’ canvases, sending wakeful eyeballs scuttling and alighting on balding pates with fresh inspiration.
A mystical energy pulses through these canvases, as if their unique images have been waiting to burst into reality. They have a hard-won immediacy, a rudimentary style born of deep study that reminds me of Philip Guston, whose own highly personal iconography erupted in scores of small, seemingly crude paintings. When an early critic took special aim at one of Guston’s works, calling the artist a “stumblebum,” Guston reacted with genuine surprise, reflecting “I thought I had put in everything I knew about painting.”
Jones has similarly poured his full knowledge of painting—including Guston’s—into these works, which mark the dawning of a new period in his life and work. They are created in the aftermath of his mother’s death, and a formative period from the birth of his first child Arah (A) to his second, Zelde (Z). The new alphabet embodied in these works tellingly numbers eighteen, the numerical value of the word chai, or life, in Hebrew.
The Parsonage is proud to exhibit these works in the historic lands of the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawnland.
Matt Jones
“In Advance of a Visit”
studio e
Seattle, WA
June 1—29, 2024
link: June 8th, 2024 artist talk
studio e is proud to present In Advance of a Visit, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Matt Jones, his first with the gallery.
“The works in In Advance of a Visit energize the mythical (medieval illumination, dream visions, folklore) through attention to the local (old-growth forests, landscape architecture, and communal gardens in Northern Manhattan). An eye hovers in the background, as the poet’s face becomes a landscape, and bats become butterflies, butterfly wings, eyes, windows, the pages of a book. Long since extinguished candles nest under heavy clouds in a Prussian blue sky, the idea of their light lingering, where a broken wrought-iron fence wilts like a flower at the edge of the canvas. The candles are less domestic objects than arboreal entities. The tree stumps are antediluvian beings, their rings expressions of an entire life pulsing against the edge of the pictorial frame. The tree stumps, rooted in thought-feelings of climate catastrophe, erode the art historical assumption of the human subject (and the borders and binaries engendered by it), tendering the possibility of multiple simultaneous perspectives. Recurring symbols are correlated into a dynamic narrative experience. The paintings invite the viewer into each pictorial moment through perspectival instability, narrative ambiguity, and the urgency of the paint handling. There is the promise of story, and yet, the story is not predetermined, it is contingent and alive to the viewer’s presence.”
Jones has had many one or two person shows including Galerie Jerome Pauchant (Paris), Freight + Volume Gallery (New York), Horton Gallery (Berlin), Castor Gallery (New York), The Richard Massey Foundation (New York), and Bleecker Street Art Club (New York. He has participated multiple art fairs including NADA Miami (The Hole, New York), Spring Break Art Fair (Old School, Brooklyn), Miami Project (Driscoll Babcock, New York) and a solo presentation at Art Brussels (Bodson Gallery, Brussels). His work has been displayed in numerous group shows including Robert Miller (New York), Soy Capitán (Berlin), Olympia (New York), Anonymous (Mexico City & New York), Driscoll Babcock Gallery (New York), ADA Gallery (Richmond, VA), Dorfman Projects (New York), Tibet House (New York), The Varsity (Brooklyn), Galleri Geo (Bergan, Norway), Grey East (East Hampton, NY), The Artbridge Drawing Room (New York), Gildar Gallery (Beverly Hills, CA), Fiebach Minninger (Cologne), Exit Art (New York), and The Hole (New York). He has done performances at Essex Flowers (New York), Anonymous (New York), Artist Space (New York), and Creative Time (New York).
Jones attended the Yale University School of Art Summer School of Painting—Norfolk on an Ellen Battell Stoeckel Grant (2001), earned a BFA from Cooper Union (2002), and received an MFA at Hunter College (2021). In 2007 he founded Puppy American, a small independent press which publishes artist books, zines, poetry, and organizes exhibitions, focusing on collaboration. He lives and works in New York City with his partner, young child, and greyhound.