SPECTACLE:

Sean Heiser & Alexis Jones

Curated by Mac Cooper and Mouminatou Thiaw

Exhibition Dates: 05.10.2025 - 06.14.2025

Arcade Arts: Gallery 56

SPECTACLE features Sean Heiser's paintings and Alexis Jones's mixed-media woodworks. Grounded in visual perception and the draw of earthly yet fantastical landscapes, this exhibition brings together artists who use the outer world to connect with their inner selves and foster reciprocity with the life systems around them.

Whether giving new life to discarded materials or grounding oneself through sky-looking, the artists collaborate with the earth to forge windows into abstract, organic scapes. As they engage with the sky, plants, or canyons, the artists build worlds of radical beauty and contentment while navigating personal memory. 

In a world of growing capitalism and individualism, SPECTACLE seeks to disrupt the self-focused, static mind and channels one’s attention towards the power of active spectatorship and portals of mutual exchange.

Alexis Jones is a painter and 3-D artist who works with salvaged and repurposed wood and acrylic, exploring the world’s excess materials and their potential to create beauty. While gathering her material from the discarded wood piles at a sign shop she works at, Jones’ embraces the raw materials’ ‘imperfections’–burns, cuts, and irregularities–transforming rejection into art. As she depicts clouds or canyons throughout her pieces, she blends organic shapes with nature-inspired colors while thinking about the world and herself in a meditative process. Jones is a BA graduate of Austin Peay State University and is based in Pleasant View, TN.

Sean Latif Heiser is a Malaysian-born and American abstract painter based in New York City. Heiser approaches his acrylic paintings as a place to mix form and color with thought, memory, fantasy and reality. His work uses elements resonant of earthly landscapes and architectures to actively build worlds in non-objective planes. Rooted in the act of looking, Heiser explores seeing and its relationship to perception, imagination, and dreaming. He views painting as an intermediary between himself and things less certain. Heiser earned his MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Exhibition Details:
Opening reception: May 10th at 6:00 p.m.
Artist and Curatorial Discussion: May 10th at 4:00 p.m.