HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce a project room presentation of new paintings by our 2026 summer residents, Bix Archer and Mason Owens.
Bix Archer approaches painting as a process of rendering experience beyond vision. Dwelling in spaces of encounter between the known and unknown, from bedrooms and driveways to suburban forests and public beaches, Archer allows the process of en plein air painting to guide her into new spaces and to see familiar ones differently. Experience becomes digested into image as she constellates and collages different moments together, working from the same site across different points in time. Figures are painted, wiped out, and repainted as they move before the artist. Some paintings are completed entirely en situ over the course of single or multiple sessions, while other work is begun on site and later completed in the studio through the use of sketches, written observation, and recollection. Rather than painting as an act of fixing something into place, Archer commits herself to observation, embracing the instability of the world and its constant transformation. Through painting, she argues for a perceptual mode that centers around disruption, dissolution, and a kind of queer side-eye.
Mason Owens’s egg tempera paintings, executed on panel, bring together devotional craft with a distinctly regional eye. Rooted in the Northeastern United States, his rural landscapes, interiors, and small-town vignettes recall the clarity of memory while drawing on the painterly inheritance of Post-Impressionism - the emphasis on atmosphere, light, and sensation rather than strict topography. Egg tempera, with its luminous matte surface and capacity for subtle tonal layering, allows Owens to capture light as something both fragile and enduring, flickering across walls, fields, and sky. His compositions hold the rhythm of lived time: shadows lengthen, daylight dilates, and thresholds between states - day and night, inside and outside, memory and presence - become perceptible. The result is a body of work that feels precise yet emotionally charged, offering moments of stillness in which attention itself becomes a devotional act.
Bix Archer (b. 1997, San Francisco) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2025 and a BA from Yale College in 2019. She is a two-time recipient of grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and has been an artist in residence with the Royal Drawing School, the Vermont Studio Center and the Yale-Norfolk School of Art. In 2025, she was a teaching fellow through the Yale Prison Education Initiative and in 2026, she was the Visiting Artist and Scholar in Teaching at Southern Oregon University. This summer, her work will be the subject of solo exhibitions with Make Room (Los Angeles) and HESSE FLATOW (New York). Her work has also recently been included in group exhibitions at the Schneider Museum of Art, OR (2026), Perrotin, NY (2025), and Make Room, LA (2025). She lives and works in New York.
Mason Owens (b. 1991, Vineland, NJ) received his BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and studied at The Glasgow School of Art. Before returning to painting in 2020, he worked for several years as a farmer, gardener, and landscaper, later joining IATSE 487 as a scenic artist in film. He has had solo exhibitions at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA and Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include Barn Studio, Millville, NJ; Common Ground Cafe, Baltimore, MD; 82 Paris, Portland, ME; and Bethesda Painting Awards, Bethesda, MD. He recently completed a residency at Upland in Putney, VT. He lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
